HTML Elements

HTML documents are text files made up of HTML elements.

HTML elements are defined using HTML tags.


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HTML Tags
HTML tags are used to mark-up HTML elements
HTML tags are surrounded by the two characters < and >
The surrounding characters are called angle brackets
HTML tags normally come in pairs like and
The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag
The text between the start and end tags is the element content
HTML tags are not case sensitive, means the same as

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HTML Elements
Remember the HTML example from the previous page:






This is my first homepage. This text is bold



This is an HTML element:

This text is bold

The HTML element starts with a start tag:
The content of the HTML element is: This text is bold
The HTML element ends with an end tag:

The purpose of the tag is to define an HTML element that should be displayed as bold.

This is also an HTML element:


This is my first homepage. This text is bold


This HTML element starts with the start tag , and ends with the end tag .

The purpose of the tag is to define the HTML element that contains the body of the HTML document.


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Why do We Use Lowercase Tags?
We have just said that HTML tags are not case sensitive: means the same as . If you surf the Web, you will notice that plenty of web sites use uppercase HTML tags in their source code. We always use lowercase tags. Why?

If you want to follow the latest web standards, you should always use lowercase tags. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends lowercase tags in their HTML 4 recommendation, and XHTML (the next generation HTML) demands lowercase tags