The structure of an HTML 3.2 document
The structure of an HTML 3.2 document
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Writing a structured document does not mean that you are writing in a
straitjacket. It only means you have to lay out the document in advance. It
also means the document becomes easier to read, maintain and extend. While this
may not seem too important if you just want a homepage, when you have a whole
site to maintain, well-structured documents make life a lot easier!
It is also important to note that HTML uses the ISO-8859-1 character set. Apart
from the entities defined in the Wilbur draft, the characters from this list
are the only ones you should use. Other characters are not guaranteed to show
up at all in a browser, let alone show up as the character you're hoping for.
Every HTML 3.2 compliant document should look basically as follows:
(Note: the line numbers are only here for the explanation below)
1.
2.
3.
4. The title of the documents
5.
6.
7.
8.
9. ... document body
10.
11.
1. DOCTYPE
This is a so-called DOCTYPE declaration. It is used by SGML tools to detect
what kind of document is being processed. If your document adheres to the
Wilbur standard, the above is what it should look like.
If your document is HTML 2.0 compliant, the DOCTYPE of it is
Some HTML editors like to include an arbitrary DOCTYPE declaration in your
documents, even when it is not correct. Note that in particular, any doctype
for HTML 3.0 is not an "official" declaration, since that proposal has been
expired for a long time now.
2. HTML
This tag goes around the entire document. Basically, it states that the rest is
all HTML, as opposed to some other language which may use tags within < and >
brackets. In theory, it can also be used by servers to see that the document
they want to send is actually HTML and not plain text. However, this is almost
never done (for performance reasons, usually).
3. HEAD
The head of your document contains information about the document itself.
Nothing within the HEAD section should be displayed in the document window. The
head section must include the TITLE of the document. It can optionally contain
things like a description, a list of keywords for search engines, and the name
of the program used to create the HTML document.
The HEAD tag is optional. If you arrange all the information about the document
at the top of the document, and all body tags below, it is obvious for a parser
where the header ends and where the body begins.
4. TITLE
The TITLE tag is the only required tag for the head section. It is typically
displayed in the browser's window title bar, and used in bookmark files and
search engine result listings. For the last two situations, you should make
sure the title is descriptive for the document - "Homepage" or "Index" doesn't
say much in a bookmark file.
5. META
META tags provide "meta information" about the document. For example, it can
give a description of the document, indicate when the document will have
expired or what program was used to generate it. There are many possible META
constructs, so please read the section on meta tags in the list of HTML tags.
This particular META tag provides a description of the document, which is used
by search engines such as Alta Vista and Infoseek.
6. LINK
A LINK tag provides information about the document relative to the rest of the
site. For example, you can have a LINK tag stating where the table of contents
is, what the next document is or where the style sheet can be found.
This particular LINK tag gives the address of the document's author. Some
browsers (most notably Lynx) allow you to send a comment to this person with
one keystroke if this tag is defined.
9. BODY
The BODY of the document contains the actual information. There may be only one
BODY statement in the document. Some editors incorrectly insert another BODY
statement for each new attribute you want to add to the body, but this can have
unexpected side-effects (such as some of the attributes getting ignored
completely).
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Designing a structured contents for your HTML document is an art in itself. I
won't go into it too deeply here. Initially, use only the six headers to set up
the structure of the document, adding lists, tables and other block elements
until the general layout of the document is finished. Then begin filling in the
blocks, marking up the text with the appropriate text-level elements. Images
are very important, but as the IMG tag is a text-level tag, it must be
contained in a block-level tag.
Often a document will be part of a set, so it will use a common style. This
style should specify a standard structure for documents, including navigation
aids and standard images. Writing a template is then a very handy thing. The
WDG's Style guide for online hypertext discusses this in more detail.
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Reference index ~ Wilbur index ~ Tag overview ~ Feedback
Copyright (c) 1997 Arnoud "Galactus" Engelfriet.