Introduction to HTML - HTML QuickStart Guide: The Simplified Beginner's Guide to HTML - page 7

The Concept of Document Structure
Before we dive into the intricacies of the web markup language, HTML, let's look at the
general concept of marking up the structure of text.
For the purpose of explaining this concept, we will create our own tags instead of using a
predefined HTML set, as it will be easier to follow and understand the underlying ideas.
Let us consider the following text:
The Fellowship of the Ring
We may either identify this text as the title of a topic written by JRR Tolkien or as the title of
a movie directed by Peter Jackson. Others might not be familiar with this text, and therefore
it is necessary to mark it properly. For starters, let us consider that this text refers to a topic
and use a label that will identify this text as a title.
<title>The Fellowship of the Ring</title>
After that, let us add information about the author so the readers know which author wrote
this topic.
<title>The Fellowship of the Ring</title>
<author>J.R.R. Tolkien</author>
We can then continue to add more information about this topic. For example, we can add the
genre and the publication date as follows:
<title>The Fellowship of the Ring</title>
<author>J.R.R. Tolkien</author>
<genre>Fantasy</genre>
<published>July 29th, 1954</published>
Let us take this one step further and encode information about more topics in the same doc-
ument. The Lord of the Rings is actually a trilogy of topics written by JRR Tolkien, so let us
record all of them. To achieve this and separate one topic from the other, we need to group
the elements referring to a single topic together to clearly note where one topic ends and an-
other begins. To group the elements, we will do what is known as nesting , meaning we will
place one element or many elements inside another to create a meaningful group.
<book>