Minimal HTML Requirements

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Web page:Markup:
This paragraph is a very simple HTML sample containing only text with very few tags. Compare this to its source code to see the minimum elements required to build an HTML doc. 
<html>

<head>
  <title>Minimal HTML Document</title>
</head>

<body>

This paragraph is a very simple HTML 
sample containing only text with very few 
tags. Compare this to its source code to 
see the minimum elements required 
to build an HTML doc.

</body>

</html>

Some HTML generalitites:

  1. HTML tags should be lowercase.
  2. Carriage returns in HTML docs are ignored by the browser (though they're very useful for organizing the HTML source so you can easily identify elements later during revision.) To create a break between lines of text or paragraphs in a web page, use <br /> (break) or <p> </p> (paragraph).
  3. Multiple spaces in HTML docs are compressed into a single space on-screen. If you want to force multiple spaces to occur, use the "non-breaking space" HTML entity.

The primary elements of an HTML doc:

<html>Tells the browser that what follows is HTML text
<head>the section of the document that contains the title (can also contain other things like meta tags, stylesheets and scripts)
<title>whatever you put between the title tags appears in the top bar of the browser window. (The title of this page is "WGD | XHTML: Minimal HTML Requirements")
</title>closes the title tag
</head>closes the head tag
<body>begins the body of the document, the place where the page's visible content goes
(The content of your web page goes between the body tags.)
</body>closes the body tag
</html>closes the html tag - the browser stops rendering here

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