LESSON 3

If you used the HTML you learned in Lesson 2 to make a personal page, you probably learned a few new things about HTML. However, you will also notice that with these tags alone, your page will look pretty bare and undeveloped. Here are some additional tags to try:

The Incredible Body Tag
You may remember the BODY tags from Lesson 2. The Body tags were that pair of tags from the last lesson that showed us where the body of the document began and ended. All of your content belongs between the opening and closing BODY tags.

If you recall, the Body tags look like this:

Moving toward greatness, our BODY tags will be getting a bit more complicated, but well worth learning. The BODY tag controls much of what your page will look like when displayed in a browser. Here's an example:

In the BODY tag example above, BODY is the element, and BGCOLOR, TEXT, LINK, ALINK, and VLINK are the attributes. The Element describes what the tag is in a general way, and the Attributes describe the tag in a specific way.

Let's look at each attribute in the example

BG in this instance stands for background color. BGCOLOR=white means that the background color for the entire page will be white.

This statement will control the color of the page's text.

This statement indicates that all hyperlinks on your page will be blue before it is clicked on. Links have to be a different color than the text, so that your visitor knows recognizes a link.

This statement indicates to the browser what color (purple) the link will turn when your mouse hovers over it.

This statement indicates that all visited hyperlinks on your page will be red after it is clicked on. Visited links are a different color than the page links, so that your visitor will know which link he or she has followed.

A Little Background
The BODY tag has one more attribute we need to discuss.

By Using the BACKGROUND attribute, you can tell the browser to go find a certain image file on your server, and use that image for the background. This attribute will override whatever you specify for a bgcolor.

NOTE: Make sure you place the image in quotation marks!

Stand Alone Tags
Recalling that most HTML tags work in pairs but that there are a few exceptions, here is an illustration of some exceptions:

Technically, the PARAGRAPH tag <P> is not really a standalone tag. However, you do not have to use a closing tag with it. Use the Paragraph tag whenever you begin a new paragraph. The line break tag <BR> will force your text or image to the next line without leaving a large space. The Horizontal Rule <HR> tag will give you a thin black line across your page.