Tags

HTML uses things called tags to specify where things should go and what they should look like. Tags are letters or words between two brackets, like this:

<tag>

There are a whole bunch of these tags, and learning HTML pretty much means learning all the various tags.

Each tag does a different thing. For example, there's one that will make your text bigger, another that will center it on the page, and another that will create a link somewhere else. So what you do is pick the tag that you want to use, then put it right in front of the word that you want to change. This tells the browser that it's supposed to do something there.

Let's say you want the word "home" to be boldfaced. Bold text is used to emphasize words, and "home" is the most important word on your page. Well, you need to tell the Web browser that you want "home" in bold, so you use the bold tag, which looks like this:

<b>

"B" stands for "bold." Most tags use abbreviations like this, making them pretty easy to remember. So the tag is telling the browser, "Look, buddy, I want everything after me to be in boldface." The Web browser does what it's told and makes the word bold.

The problem is that the browser doesn't know when to stop - it'll put every single word after that tag into boldface. To keep this from happening, you need to tell the browser when enough is enough. That's why HTML has closing tags. Closing tags are just like the regular tags (sometimes called "opening tags"), except there's a slash in there before the letter. The closing tag for boldfacing, then, looks like this:

</b>

What this tag does is tell the browser, "Stop! No more boldface, please! I beg you!" So if you just want the word "home" put into boldface, you stick the regular tag in front of "home" and the closing tag after it:

<b>home </b>