Markup Tags

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A “markup tag” is the fundamental characteristic of HTML. Every markup tag is a command placed between “wickets” or “angle brackets”—a left bracket (<) and a right bracket (>). Markup tags are not revealed by a web browser; they are invisible.

In most cases, markup tags (containing commands) come in pairs, with text or a graphic image located between the beginning and ending tags:

<COMMAND>text or graphic image</COMMAND>: controls or regulates the text or graphic image information between the two non-empty markup tags.

Pairs of markup tags are referred to as “non-empty” tags, because something is contained between the beginning tag and the ending tag. A beginning tag and an ending tag are identical, except a “slash” (/) is placed before the command of the ending tag to tell the browser that the command has been completed.

Frequently, certain parameters are included within the beginning command tag, placed before the second bracket:

PARAMETER1="X" PARAMETER2="Y": provide supplementary instructions (such as colorization, measurement, location, alignment, or other appearances) to the data between the markup tags. Note: Although quotation marks (" ") for supplementary parameters will be included in all examples in this tutorial, these quotation marks are optional for most browsers and usually do not need to be included in source code documents. One of the most common errors in HTML scripting is leaving out one pair of quotation marks ("), causing the marked up version to appear jumbled or nonsensical. This is one reason why elimination altogether of quotation marks around parameter variables may be the best option.

So a typical pair of non-empty HTML tags in a source code, with the first tag containing a command along with a few parameters, would resemble this: <COMMAND PARAMETER1="X" PARAMETER2="Y" PARAMETER3="Z">text</COMMAND>

Some HTML tags are referred to as “empty” tags, because they consist only of a single tag rather than a pair of tags. That is, an “empty” tag consists only of a <COMMAND> tag and lacks an ending </COMMAND> tag. Examples of non-empty and empty tags will be given in other sections.

I recommend using UPPERCASE letters for all HTML commands and associated parameters, because it is easier to distinguish them from regular text whenever one creates or proofreads an HTML source code document.

Proceed to Structuring Tags

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