: What are the essential HTML tags? I want to know what HTML tags are "compulsory" a web-page should have, in order for it to be displayed by a web-browser. Also, what is the difference between
I want to know what HTML tags are "compulsory" a web-page should have, in order for it to be displayed by a web-browser.
Also, what is the difference between different versions of HTML, in general?
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I'm going to say none.
I want to know what HTML tags are "compulsory" a web-page should have, in order for it to be displayed by a web-browser.
Just create a .html file and put in it:
Hello world
It will display in all web browsers. If you want to drop lines:
Hello world<br><br>This is my next paragraph
I'd say that's the bare minimum as a direct and probably unpopular answer to your question. The other answers have more what you should have as a standards compliant minimum.
The absolute minimum HTML you need to create a page that the W3C's validator considers valid is:
<!doctype html><title></title>
The doctype declaration says that we're using HTML5. The <title> tag would contain the page title. However, since such a page is practically useless, it's much more common to see a simple document structure containing <head> and <body> tags, like this:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Your page title</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Your page content</p>
</body>
</html>
You can improve on this further by telling the browser that we're using a UTF-8 character set, and that the primary language of the document is English:
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Your page title</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Your page content</p>
</body>
</html>
Next, we'll add an external stylesheet:
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Your page title</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
</head>
<body>
<p>Your page content</p>
</body>
</html>
This is now approaching the minimum I'd start with. In practice, I'd normally set up a container div element called "content" to hold the rest of my layout:
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Your page title</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">
<p>Your page content</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
This gives you more control over the central page element -- you can centre all page content (and have a full-width background image in the page body) by editing your style.css file to look like this:
#content {
width: 960px;
margin: 0 auto;
}
Regarding different HTML versions, they are simply incremental revisions. 'HTML5' is the fifth revision of the HTML specification, with a wide range of differences and improvements over HTML4. As such, it almost always makes sense to use the latest version (by starting your document with <!doctype html>) when you can.
By the letter of the HTML 4.01 standard, the only compulsory element is <title> (with a corresponding </title> tag), however browsers will display as HTML anything that looks like HTML* or is served with a text/html content type.
‘Looking like HTML’ is a browser-dependant heuristic.
The bare essentials you need for a valid HTML5 document, as oulined in Bruce Lawson's blog are
<!doctype html>
<html lang=en>
<meta charset=utf-8>
<title>blah</title>
<body>
<p>I'm the content
The unclosed <html>, <body> and <p> elements are invalid in older versions of HTML though (specifically XHTML1), so Bruce recommends closing these and also including a <head> section.
In reality any web page that has more than just a few paragraph of text will also heavily use <div> elements to lay out content, as well as <a href="link"> (anchor) tags for hyperlinks and probably <img src="image.jpg"> for images.
The website html5.org has a useful list of all currently valid HTML elements, including the new HTML5 ones.
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