CHAPTER 1

Example 1-2. Unordered list
<ul>
<li>Pizza</li>
<li>Beer</li>
<li>Dogs</li>
</ul>
The tags covered so far are all block tags. The defining characteristic of block tags is
that they are displayed on a line of their own, with no elements to the left or right of
them. That is why the heading, paragraphs, and list items progress down the page
instead of across it. The opposite of a block tag is an inline tag, which, as the name
implies, can appear in a line. The emphasis tag (em) is an example of an inline tag, and
it looks like this:
<p>I <em>really</em> hope you like it.</p>
The granddaddy of the inline tags—and arguably the coolest feature of HTML—is the
a tag. The “a” stands for anchor, but at times I’ll also refer to it as a link or hyperlink.
Text wrapped in an anchor tag is clickable, such that clicking on it causes the browser
to load a new HTML page.
To tell the browser which new page to load, we have to add what’s called an attribute
to the tag. Attributes are named values that you insert into an open tag. In an anchor
tag, you use the href attribute to specify the location of the target page. Here’s a link
to Google’s home page:
<a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a>
That might look like a bit of a jumble if you are not used to reading HTML, but you
should be able to pick out the URL for the Google home page. You’ll be seeing a lot of
a tags and href attributes throughout the book, so take a minute to get your head around
this if it doesn’t make sense at first glance.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind regarding attributes. Different
HTML tags allow different attributes. You can add multiple
attributes to an open tag by separating them with spaces. You never add
attributes to a closing tag. There are hundreds of possible combinations
of attributes and tags, but don’t sweat it—we only have to worry about
a dozen or so in this entire book.
The HTML snippet that we’ve been looking at would normally reside in the body section
of a complete HTML document. An HTML document is made up of two sections: the
head and the body. The body is where you put all the content that you want users to
see. The head contains information about the page, most of which is invisible to the
user.