Digisign HTML reference. Welcome to the Digisign HTML page. HTML is composed of tags. The tags are always enclosed in angle-brackets ( < > ) and are case insensitive so it does not matter if you type them in upper or lower case. A lot of people prefer to use upper case because it makes the tags easier to pick out in a document but you can choose whatever you like. Tags typically occur in begin and end pairs. These pairs are in the form where the <tag> indicates the beginning of a tag-pair, and the </tag> indicates the end. The spaces in between the tags indicate where the content is placed. Where the word "tag" appears is where the actual name of the tag will be placed. For instance if you would like a heading you would place "H1" down to "H6" depending on the size of your heading. The first and last tags in a document should always be the HTML tags. These are the tags that tell a Web browser where the HTML in your document begins and ends. The most basic of all possible Web documents is: <HTML> </HTML> That is it, this is a web page in it's absolute simplest form. If you were to load such a page into a web browser, it wouldn't do anything except give you a blank screen, but it is technically a valid Web page. You will obviously want to put some text and perhaps images on your page so the first thing you need is the HEAD tags which contain all of the document's information. Not your actual heading of your page that appears in the browser window, but things like the document title. Between the TITLE tags, you should have the title of your document. This will appear at the top of the browser's title bar, the history list and most important in the bookmark file if someone wants to return to your page. You should always insert a document title and it should have a connection with the site or page content. The length of the title is up to you but best is to keep it short. If you leave the title blank the browser will most likely use the file name that you have saved your document as. Next you will need the BODY tags which comes after the HEAD structure. Between the BODY tags, you will eventually place all your content that will get displayed in the browser window. All of the text, the graphics, java, links, and so on -- these things occur between the BODY tags. So, putting everything together thus far into one file, we have: <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Your Document Title</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> </BODY> </HTML> Now this is still a blank web page so you will have to add some content to make it come alive. All these tags will now be placed between the <BODY> - and - </BODY> tags. Most likely you will want to put some colors and graphics on your page to make it more appealing. For adding pictures, buttons, icons etc please see our Graphics page. To add a background color and to choose color settings for you text and links you need to add the information inside the <BODY>. For example this page has a black background and white text, finally the links are yellow so the BODY tag for this document looks like: <BODY BGCOLOR="#000000" TEXT="#FFFFFF" LINK="#FFBA5B" VLINK="#FFA8A8" ALINK="#FFFFFF"> BGCOLOR is self explanatory, this is where the background color value is indicated. For this page it is #000000 which is the setting for black #FFFFFF is white in so called "Hexadecimal". TEXT and LINK need no explanation but VLINK is the color for a Visited Link and ALINK for the Active Link which is the color for a link when it is clicked. To explain all the colors here would take to long. Most webeditors will have an automated function for choosing backgrounds and colors. You can also download a great little software called RGB2Hexadecimal to help you choose you colors precisely. Remember to use the web safe colors otherwise you may get unwanted effects. OK, now to put some text and content into your document. First you will need a heading for your page. Headings use the tags <H1>Heading</H1> being the largest <H6>Heading<H6> being the smallest An automatic break in the text will surround a heading tag and they will look like this: H1 HeadingH6 HeadingSo it is best to have the heading where it is intended to go; at the top of the page and not in the middle. You can instead control the font size by changing the size of the font by inserting <font size=5>your text here</font>. Note that when using the font size the size number is reversed where a font size=6 is large and font size=1 is small. You can even have negative font size. Also keep in mind that browsers allow the user to set the font size so using an H6 heading does not necessarily mean that the viewer will have small fonts.Next you will want to put your text into PARAGRAPHS or <P> your text here </P>. You should also note that when using the PARAGRAPH tags there will automatically be a space inserted between the texts. Otherwise if you wish to have line breaks the you will use the <BR> tag. You can also position your text by using : Finally you can alter your text in various ways. You can for instance use:
I hope this has given you a vague idea of the basic structure of HTML. There are obviously tons of tags for setting background colors, text colors and inserting images etc.etc. It would be difficult for me to fit all this in to this simple guide and would therefor refer you to look at the many various guides and tutorials available on the web.
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