2.4 HTML Skeleton
Notice, too, that our simple example HTML
document starts and ends with
<html> and
</html> tags. These tags tell the browser
that the entire document is composed in HTML.[2] The HTML and XHTML standards require an
<html> tag for compliant documents, but most
browsers can detect and properly display HTML encoding in a text
document that's missing this outermost structural
tag. [<html>]
[2] XHTML
documents also begin with the <html> tag,
but they contain additional information to differentiate them from
common HTML documents. See Chapter 16 for
details.
Like our example, all HTML and XHTML documents have two main
structures: a head and a body, each
bounded in the source by respectively named start and end tags. You
put information about the document in the head and the contents you
want displayed in the browser's window inside the
body. Except in rare cases, you'll spend most of
your time working on your document's body content.
[<head>] [<body>]
There are several different document header tags that you can use to
define how a particular document fits into a document collection and
into the larger scheme of the Web. Some nonstandard header tags even
animate your document.
For most documents,
however, the important header element is the title. Standards require
that every HTML and XHTML document have a title, even though the
currently popular browsers don't enforce that rule.
Choose a meaningful title, one that instantly tells the reader what
the document is about. Enclose yours, as we do for the title of our
example, between the <title> and
</title> tags in your
document's header. The popular browsers typically
display the title at the top of the document's
window. [<title>]