HTML Guide and Reference Sheet

 

 


Fundamentals

HTML uses tags to alter how things are displayed on a page. A tag is a command written withing angled brackets and placed around an element (picture, text, or other object). There are two tags around each element, an opening tag:

<command>

and a closing tag

</command>

They combine to look like this:

<command>Your text or picture here</command>

Tags can be combined and nested. For example, the <big> command makes a font increase in size. Using nested <big> tags can make a string of text continually increase in size.

Examine the following code:

<big>Some text, <big>some more text, <big>and some more.</big></big></big>

The <big> tag is used three times, each successive tag nested inside the one before it, making the font size grow more and more. The resulting HTML page will display like this:

Some text, some more text, and some more.

Tags can also have attributes. An attribute is a value that changes the way a tag works. For example, the <font> tag is used to adjust the font of some text. To change the color of that font, we use the color attribute.

Here is some text that is <font color="red">red</font>

It displays like this:

Here is some text that is red

 


Fonts

There are many tags that affect the look of text on your page. Here are some of the most common ones.


Tag Used for Example
<strong> For making text boldface This text is bold
<em> For making text italicized This text is italicized
<big> For increasing text size This text is bigger
<small> For decreasing text size This text is smaller
<sup>
<sub>
For superscript and subscript text This text is superscript and this is subscript
<tt> Makes the text fixed-width ("typewriter text") This text is fixed-width and monospace
<font color="red"> Makes the text red. You can replace red with the appropriate color. Note the space between font and color.
red fuchsia
orange maroon
yellow lime
green olive
blue aqua
purple teal
brown navy
black gray
<font face=" "> For changing the typeface. Since not all users' computers will have the same fonts installed, we must instead specify a family of fonts.

<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Your text here</font>