Choose a link to get started:

ALL NEW!!!

 Scrolling Marquees

The Basics

 The Basics
Manipulating Text
Images
Backgrounds
Links

More Advanced Topics

 The <HEAD> Tag
Tables
Forms
Frames
Lists

Advanced Topics

 Image Maps
CSS - Part 1
CSS - Part 2
CSS - Part 3
CSS - Part 4

Additional Topics

 XML Tag Formatting
XHTML - Part 1
XHTML - Part 2

The <HEAD> Tag

        For those of you how went through the basics tutorial, do you remember how in the basic setup of a web page was a section starting with <HEAD> and ending with </HEAD>? Well, this tutorial is designed to teach you how to use that section to your advantage. That section has many different tags, mostly to be used with the search engines, but using them on all your web pages makes you site more noticable in the search engines eyes. So, without furthur ado, here we go....

        The first concept is that of starting and finishing the section. This may seem like common sense, but I would like to stress it none the less. Always start this section immediately after the <HTML> tag. The very next tag should be <HEAD>. No exceptions. Well, you get the idea. When you are done, please do not forget to use the </HEAD> tag. Your page will be screwed up if you don't.


        Now we get to the components of the section. There are many components, but only a few will be discussed here. If you need to know the others, E-Mail Me. I will be more than happy to tell you. Anyway, here is a list of the components covered :

  • TITLE
  • BASE
  • LINK
  • META


        The first to be covered is the <TITLE> tag. Please note that all of these tags go in between the HEAD tags and are NOT ATTRIBUTES. The <TITLE> tag defines the title of a document. Well, duh, but what is the TITLE? The title is the text you see in the bar at the top of the browser window. The TITLE for this page is : HTML Basics - HTML at its easiest. The TITLE must be contained within the <TITLE> tag and its counterpart, the </TITLE> tag. Do not forget this end tag. YOUR PAGE WILL BE SCREWED UP WITHOUT FAIL IF YOU DO NOT INCLUDE THE </TITLE> TAG.

<TITLE>HTML at its easiest</TITLE>



        

The <BASE HREF> tag is next. When you put this tag in the <HEAD> section, every link you put on the page, such as <A HREF="index.html">, will contain the <BASE HREF> value in front of it. It may work without it, but if someone downloads the page to a harddrive, the links like above would be dead, so this allows for them to use it. It contains the domain name and directory(s).

<BASE HREF="http://www.oocities.org/htmlbasic_2000">



        The next topic is the <LINK> tag. There are two attributes, REL and HREF. The REL attribute tells what the relevance of the linked document will be. If you haven't figured it out. The tag links another document, usually a stylesheet to the current document. The only value of REL you should be concerned with at the moment is stylesheet. The CSS tutorial is on its way, so be patient, as this tag will have alomst no use to you know, but you need to know it anyway. The HREF designates the name of the document linked. For example, if I wanted link a page called "standard.css" to the page, I would use HREF="standard.css". Get It??

<LINK REL="stylesheet" HREF="stylesheet/standard.css">



        Our final, and definately most lengthy topic is the <META> tag. This tells search engines all the information they need to catalog your site. Our course, you have to register with the search engine first, but more on that later. The META tag has 2 attributes you need be concerned with : NAME and CONTENT. The other is HTTP-EQUIV, but that will be later too. The NAME can have one of several values, and the CONTENT will vary based on the value of NAME. The first example would be if the value of NAME would be "description". This tells a description of the site. The CONTENT would have a value of the description of the site.

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="HTML at its easiest">


        The next value for NAME will be "keywords". This shows, obviously, keywords of the site. Therefore, the value of the CONTENT attribute would be various keywords of the site.

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="HTML, images, css, jss, javascript">


        For our next attribute, we will discuss the AUTHOR attribute. This should require no explanation as it describes, well, the author, and the author should be the value of the CONTENT attribute. When using the "generator" attribute, you will use NotePad as the value of the CONTENT attribute, since all of your web pages will probably be made through NotePad.

<META NAME="author" CONTENT="author's name">
<META NAME="generator" CONTENT="NotePad">



        Well, that ends the tutorial on the HEAD section. The only time this section is not used is when you have frames, but I will get to that later. Anyway, now that we have that out of the way, go back and do some more tutorials. They will surely be of help to you.