There are two basic parts to the structure of a web page. The head and the body. There is a third piece, the DOCTYPE, or html version, information, but that usually gets discussed with the head.
The head of an html, or web, page contains the hidden information that interacts between your web browser (Safari, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, etc.) and the web server. The body contains the information that you see in your web browser.
Let’s start with the head. Here’s an excerpt from a html file’s head:
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />
<title>ITS Knowledge Base & Software: Web Publishing Archives</title>
<style type=”text/css”>@import “http://www.southwestern.edu/ITS/kbs/styles-site.css”;</style>
</head>
The first two lines contain the html version information. This varies from file to file depending on how the file is created. Check here for more information. The example file uses the XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype. Web browsers read this and know how to present the html file.
The next line is the beginning of the head tag and immediately after we have head information. First is the character set information. This affects how the font characters are presented. Especially useful when dealing with foreign languages. Next is the title. This is what is displayed at the top of your browser window. The next line is the stylesheet link. Last is the close tag for the head.
The body of an html file contains everything that is displayed in your browser window. It starts with the <body> tag and is closed with the </body> tag. Everything in between gets rendered on the screen.
This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2003 at 3:02 PM and filed in Web Publishing, Knowledge Base. Bookmark this entry.