HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
<a href="http://www.oreilly.com/catalog.html">
<ul compact>
<ul compact="compact">
<input type=text name=filename size=24 maxlength=80>
<link title="Table of Contents">
The first example is the
<a>
tag for a hyperlink to our publisher's web-
based catalog of products. It has a single attribute,
href
, followed by the
catalog's address in cyberspaceits URL.
The second example shows an HTML tag that formats text into an un-
ordered list of items. Its single attribute
compact
, which limits the space
between list itemsdoes not require a value.
The third example demonstrates how the second example must be writ-
ten in XHTML. Notice the
compact
attribute now has a value, albeit a re-
dundant one, and that its value is enclosed in double quotes.
The fourth example shows an HTML tag with multiple attributes, each
with a value that does not require enclosing quotation marks. Of course,
with XHTML, each attribute value must be enclosed in double quotes.
The last example shows proper use of enclosing quotation marks when
the attribute value is more than one word long.
What is not immediately evident in these examples is that while HTML
attribute names are not case-sensitive (
href
works the same as
HREF
and
HreF
in HTML), most attribute values are case-sensitive. The value
file-
name
for the
name
attribute in the
<input>
tag example is not the same as
the value
Filename
, for instance.
3.3.3. Starting and Ending Tags
We alluded earlier to the fact that most tags have a beginning and an
end and affect the portion of content between them. That enclosed seg-
ment may be large or small, from a single text character, syllable, or
