HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Getting better, but are all headings the same? How about if we indicate the most important heading
with the number 1 and a less important heading with a 2, like this:
<h1>Article. I.</h1>
<h2>Section. 1.</h2>
Now when a computer program, like a browser, renders this marked-up text, it strips out the markup
symbols (called
tags
in HTML) and shows the text with the appropriate styling, as shown in Figure 1-1.
FiGure 1-1
Most of this topic explores the wide range of HTML tags used to mark up web page content so that
you can create web pages that look the way you want them to.
How browsers sTyLe web PaGes
Like most computer software, a web browser only works with a particular type of file. An HTML
page typically ends in the file extension of
.html
or
.htm
. When a browser loads an
.html
document,
it begins to redraw the screen according to the included HTML markup and content.
The browser has a default style for each HTML tag that indicates a visual element for the page, such
as a heading, that governs the size, color, and other properties of the element. These default styles —
and, in fact, how HTML tags are applied in general — are based on a recommendation by the inter-
national consortium that determines HTML specifications, the W3C. Each browser determines how
best to interpret the HTML recommendations, which explains why web pages can look different
from one browser to the next.
