HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
THE FUNDAMENTALS
Before we get going on dealing with text on a Web page, we need to consider the fundamental
elements of a Web page. h ey include three types of actions:
Displaying text
Loading and displaying graphics
Linking to other pages
To display text, all you need to do is type it on the page in the
<body>
container. You can
style it with the
<h>
tag as you know from previous chapters, but basic text requires only that
it be in the body of a page.
Loading and displaying graphics uses the
<img>
tag with the following format:
<
img src
=
”imageName.png”
>
You can use only
.jpg
,
.png
, or
.gif
i les with the
img
element. h e
src
attribute refers to
the source of the graphic. h e
img
element has other attributes, but all you need to get an
image on the page is the
src
attribute so that the i le can be located.
h roughout the topic, the term URL is ot en used to refer to a i le's location — no matter what
type of i le is involved. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and refers to a standard
protocol for i nding and using dif erent types of i les.
44
Finally, a link to another page uses the following format:
<
a href
=
”anotherPage.html”
>
Link abel
</
a
>
h e
href
refers to the linked page's hypertext reference, or more simply put, its address. Like
an image's source locations, you'll see the term url used for a linked page's address as well.
One more thing you need to know before continuing. h e document type declaration
(
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
) in the very i rst line is important — don't ever leave it out. However,
an equally important line is declaring the character encoding. h is is used to tell the Web
browser which character set of letters to use, such as the A to Z alphabet, Hebrew characters,
Japanese, Cryllic, or some other set. You can do it in several ways, but this topic uses the
following code:
<
meta http
-
equiv
=
”Content-Type”
content
=
”text/html; charset=UTF-8”
>
You always should specify character encoding. Although using the
<meta>
tag is a bit long,
you can just cut and paste it in all your Web pages. If you don't, you can run into security
vulnerabilities, and nobody wants that.