Informer's World

The simplest HTML tags arrange text into blocks, designate the font or letter-style, and size of the type. Bold, italic and underline are each identified within an HTML tag that precedes the letter or word(s) to be effected. The tag appears again at the end of the chosen text with a slash to indicate the effect ends there. For example, see how the following sentence appears in HTML:


HTML tags are the core of Hypertext Markup Language. HTML tags are the core of Hypertext Markup Language.

The “b” stands for bold and HTML tags are always enclosed in angled brackets, with the closing tag starting with a forward slash. If the forward slash is forgotten, the remainder of the page will assume the effect.

In addition to changing fonts, HTML tags also create hyperlinks, or clickable text. The hyperlink tag includes an embedded website address (URL or Uniform Resource Locator). By placing a hyperlink tag around a phrase or name, clicking on it will take the surfer to the desired address. This can be a remote website or another page within the same website.

HTML tags can also be used to take a surfer to another spot within the same page. This is handy for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) or indexes that reside on a single page. By clicking on a question or an indexed subject, the visitor can jet to the exact information he or she needs without paging down through the entire document.

Other HTML tags imbed graphics, movies, sound effects, animation or Flash scripts in webpages. Frames, borders, background and page layouts are also designated by HTML tags.

On websites with multiple pages there are often characteristics the webmaster wants to repeat on each page. These might include the font type, website colors, background and text blocking or layout. Rather than repeat these HTML tags on every page, HTML allows for a bit of code at the top of each page that points the browser to a master style sheet which contains the HTML tags that apply. A master style sheet is known as Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) because its effects can “cascade” across several pages.