oblaat
a guide to conceiving, creating & publishing your own website
a guide to conceiving, creating & publishing your own website
Just like I said before, your head isn't what actually makes you "work". If your head was chopped off, you would be easily identified: That's my cousin's decapitated head! But there wouldn't be much left of you. You would not be alive because the important bits of you would all be gone.
The body of a HTML document contains everything that the person viewing it should actually be shown. It contains the meat and bones of the document itself: all of its headings, paragraphs, embedded images and hyperlinks should be declared here.
There are a few essential things that you will find in almost every HTML document, and all of these things are represented with different elements. Here I will introduce the concepts. The elements themselves will come soon.
Many HTML documents adhere to a certain structure. This is not actually required, but many documents that are not HTML have a similar structure too.
Often, a HTML document will have the following "parts" presented in an order like this:
The parts other than the main content are often consistent across the website, or consistent across one section of the website.
Across this website you see the same header and footer: the header includes the feature image, title and subtitle. After that, you see the main content, and then the footer at the end includes a copyright disclaimer. There is even some navigation on the top and bottom of each article.
This being said, people experiment with their layouts more and more. This is one of the joys of Web: where people could once only express themselves through words, they can now use all sorts of design tricks to make these words appear entirely unique, with any layout that can be pictured in the mind brought to life.
One might even express oneself entirely through images. Isn't that cool?
These elements separate one part of your web page from another. Just as with any other document, what sections these represent are up to you and what you are writing—a web-novel might be sectioned into chapters, but something more informational might be sectioned up into topics.
A text with no split paragraphs, that presents itself as one continuous line of text, suffers from Wall of Text Syndrome. It becomes very hard to read. As such, paragraphs are essential!
The hyper in hypertext is there because it is "more than text". Hypertext includes hyperlinks, and hyperlinks do the important job of taking you from one place to another.
Hyperlinks can link to places within documents, like being able to click on a line in a table of contents to go to that part of the page. They can also link to other documents, like another web page or to an image. They are the backbone of the Web.
Here is a fun fact: images did not originally exist as a HTML element! If you wanted to show somebody an image, you could not embed it in a page. You would have to link to it and they would download it and view it alone.
One day some genius named Marc Andreessen asked for images to be added directly inside of documents. And so they were. You can insert an image anywhere now... for better or for worse...
You can list anything you want, and with a dedicated feature too. In an ordered list, the computer will keep track of the number forever —you don't have to do a thing.
Of course, these are just some of the things you can put inside your HTML document, but they are the most essential and the most common.