- Recognize basic HTML document structure
- Recognize HTML comments
- Describe the
headsection and its contents - Create an HTML document
Every HTML document has a specific set of required tags. Because these are required every time we create a web page, it is valuable to gain a more in-depth understanding of what these tags do, why they are useful, and how they work in context to the modern web.
We will be both reviewing setting up well-formed HTML documents and expanding a
bit on the DOCTYPE, html and head tags, as well as introducing how to add
comments within our HTML code.
If you haven't already, fork and clone this lesson into your local environment.
Navigate into its directory in the terminal, then run code . to open the files
in Visual Studio Code (If you are using a different text editor, the command
will be different). Finally, run bundle to install the lab's dependencies.
Let's start by adding the bare essentials of an HTML document to the provided
index.html file:
- A
DOCTYPEtag, which looks like this:<!DOCTYPE html> - Opening and closing
htmltags - Opening and closing
headtags nested inside thehtmltags - Opening and closing
bodytags nested inside thehtmltags
If written correctly, running rspec now will pass the first test of this
lab. However you will not be done yet! We have to make all the tests
pass in order to make the test code happy! Fixing this first one means that we
get to attack the next one. Let's get to it!
Let's take a closer look at these tags.
At the top of every HTML document, you're always going to start off with the
same element, DOCTYPE. In the early days of the internet, there were fewer
standards, and it was important to declare the specific way we wanted browsers
to interpret the file at the top of each file. Netscape and Internet Explorer
would look for this declaration and handle the content differently depending on
what it found. These days, every current browser is compatible with HTML5, and
DOCTYPE is mainly used to tell the browser to render the page in standards
compliant mode.
The DOCTYPE element, as with all HTML, starts with a < and ends with a >.
Uniquely, the DOCTYPE tag starts with an exclamation point, !, followed by
DOCTYPE, then specifies which version of HTML we want to use. In HTML5, we
just write html and the browser interprets the rest of the document as HTML5.
The next element is also always required: <html>. This tells the browser that
everything that falls between the opening and closing html tags is to be
interpreted as HTML code.
One attribute that is important to include in the <html> tag is lang, which
declares what language the webpage is written in. In our case, writing in
English, we will use lang="en". This helps search engines to know what
language a page is written in. Google, for instance, can use the lang
attribute to know when to prompt users about translating web content.
<html lang="en"></html>Sometimes we want to leave notes either for ourselves or for other developers inside of our HTML files. An example might be a brief explanation of what some part of the code is doing, or an important message or reminder. We can write comments by wrapping the text we want like so:
<!-- This is a comment! -->Text included in a comment will not be visible on the webpage, but will be
visible in the browser console and .html file.
Inside our html tags, we divide the page into two main sections, head, and
body, which both play unique roles. The remainder of our HTML lessons will
cover everything within the body section, but before we get there, there are
some additional bits of information we need to understand regarding the head.
The head section is not visible to a website visitor, but it contains a lot of
useful info about our webpage.
In the head section, we place a number of specific tags, most notably:
<link><title>
Let's look at each of them in turn:
The <link> tag is for importing files.
CAREFUL: It's easy to get confused here because web pages are full of links,
but also use a <link> tag. "Links" that you click on are located within the
<body> element. The <link> tags are located in the <head> element.
Most commonly, we'll use <link> to import CSS files. Like so:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" />Linking style sheets this way allows multi-page websites to share a source of
styling content for every page, making for a consistent, easy to maintain file
structure. Often, on fully developed websites, multiple style sheets are linked
in the head. For example, when doing the final polishing of a web site you
might see a series of <link> definitions like:
<link
rel="stylesheet"
href="https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.1.1/css/bootstrap.min.css"
/>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="company.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="engineering-department.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="project-x-launch.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="typography.css" />In this example we're getting some CSS information from the
Bootstrap project, we're integrating a company
style standard, an engineering style standard, a style motif for the launch of
"Project X" and then we're adding some specific rules about font display. You
can bring in a lot of information with the <link> tag!
This specific example aside, you'll be learning a lot more about linking files to create stylistic effect in later lessons.
One more common tag we find in the head is title. The title, as its name
implies, is where the title of the webpage should be entered. Text added inside
the title tags will appear up on your browser tab. Adding a title for our
index.html page would look something like:
<title>Cat Perry's Favorite Cats</title>Notice that unlike the previous tags we've discussed, title has an opening and
closing tag. In most modern browsers, tabs are fairly small, so it is often best
to keep the title brief, or it will not be fully visible.
Okay, time to put what we've learned to the test. To complete this lab, you must
apply all the tags we've discussed in this lesson. Run rspec to see what is
required to pass each test. Each test will urge you on.
Currently, the work you've done on this assignment is only on your local machine. To preserve work on your GitHub fork, you will need to stage the changes you've made, commit them, and push the commit up to GitHub. Use the following commands to do this:
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Completed assignment"
$ git pushIf you visit your fork on GitHub, you should now see that you've made the most recent commit, and your solution will be present in the files.
In this lesson, we've reviewed the basics of document structure, as well as what
is typically contained within the head. Using the head section, we are able
to add relevant data about our webpage as a whole. As a bonus surprise, by
learning how to make our web pages search engine friendly, we've also dabbled
a bit into the basics of Search Engine Optimization! We are now ready to take a
deeper dive into the visual content of HTML pages.
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