oblaat

a guide to conceiving, creating & publishing your own website

Elements in HTML

Every HTML document is made up of many many elements. Each element is a particular part of the document which has a particular purpose: giving information about the document itself, stating where the main content is, separating paragraphs from each other, inserting links or images...

Elements all have the same few parts: they are all differentiated from regular text via the < and > symbols, and the "tags" come in pairs—one tag to show where the elements starts, and one to show where it ends. Here is how you would insert a paragraph, for example:

<p>This is a paragraph. Huzzah!</p>

The letter P is the first letter of the English word "paragraph", to make things easier to remember. When you wrap text in these tags, it becomes one element which represents a paragraph.

Empty elements

There is a type of element that does not come in pairs and instead has only one tag. This is called an empty element as there is nothing "inside" of it.

The most common empty element is the img element. You do not have to define where an image starts and ends; an image is an image! So there is only one tag.