Okay, this is about the general structure of an HTML document. There are two things to remember:
- The document must begin with <HTML> and end with </HTML>
- The document will be divided into the HEAD section and the BODY section.
THE HEAD SECTION
The HEAD section (which begins with <HEAD> and ends with </HEAD>) contains the invisible INFORMATION about a page. There are really two main things which the average <HEAD> tag contains, two important things anyway: the TITLE of the page (which appears in the title-bar of your web-browser's window when you go to a page), and also something called the META tags. I'll deal with each of these separately:
The TITLE of this page is "GoLiveHeaven :: HTML Basics : The Whole Document [Head]" - you should see that in the title-bar of your browser (Navigator will put "Netscape:" before the title). The HTML is simple, but you MUST REMEMBER to put it in the HEAD section, NOT the BODY.
<TITLE>Kathy's HTML tips</TITLE>
The structure of an HTML page would thus always be like this:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Title goes here</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="white" TEXT="black" LINK="blue" ALINK="red" VLINK="red">
Cool stuff in here, with links and probably another of those irritating visitor-counters somewhere.
More cool stuff, and far too many images.
</BODY>
</HTML>
Now we come to the other content of the HEAD section, the META tags. META tags serve two purposes: they give information about your document, and they also (believe it or not) enable the search-engines to categorise it. There are several META tags, and I'll show them all below first, then explain them. NOTE! - All the tags start with META and have a different parameter in them, but you MUST have a separate tag for each!! You can't have, for example 'AUTHOR' and 'KEYWORDS' inside one META tag. See below to see what I mean.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="HTML, tips, Matt, Ridley, Mattman, tutorial, code, coolness">
<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="The Mattman - mattman@mattman.net">
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="This page gives a short tutorial on the main features of HTML.">
Okay, now to explain them one at a time:
<META HTTP-EQUIV=...> You do NOT need to know about this. Just copy it exactly into all your HTML files, and that's fine. You can also leave it out if you like; don't even spend a moment thinking about this one.
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT=...> This tag enables the search-engines to categorise your page, based on keywords which you supply. It's up to you to be honest about it. You can have any number of keywords, and you can repeat a keyword as much as you like in order to improve your ranking in search-engine results, but be aware that some search-engines now penalise your page's ranking if you use the same keyword more than seven times (InfoSeek does this).
<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT=...> This, obviously, gives the name and any other information you like about the author of the page. Like all META tags, it is completely optional.
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT=...> This gives a description of your page, and is usually displayed in search-engines results as the 'Summary' of your page, so word it well, preferably using some of the keywords from above, but in proper descriptive sentences. Again, optional.
AN IMPORTANT NOTE: META tags do not 'close' - meaning, there is no such tag as </META> - DO NOT USE IT!!!
ANOTHER IMPORTANT NOTE: As I said previously, you must have a new META tag for each type of CONTENT; author, description etc. You CANNOT have more than one type of CONTENT in one META tag - DO NOT DO THIS!!!
