HTML Basics

All HTML tags are written between "less than" and "greater than" signs (angle brackets). Many HTML tags are container tags, that is, they have both an opening and a closing tag. All the content that appears between these tags will be affected by them. Think of the opening tag as a switch that "turns on" the effect and the closing tag as a switch that "turns off" the effect.

The opening and closing tags use exactly the same word or symbol (e.g., h1), but the closing tag has a backslash before the word or symbol (e.g., /h1) in order to differentiate it from the opening tag. If you're using one of these container tags, you must include the closing tag as well as the opening tag. If you forget and leave off the close tag, your text may not show up in the browser, or it may not have the style you expect it to have because you didn't turn the effect off after you turned it on. In HTML, some of these close tags were optional; in XHTML, none of them are. Since all Web pages will eventually be written in XHTML, it's best to get into the habit of including close tags for all container tags