Elementary, My Dear Watson

In the previous tutorials I covered the basics of HTML. If you've read through them, you should be getting a pretty good idea of how HTML works. So far we've covered global document structure, elements, attributes and hyperlinks.

This week we're going to take a look at various basic elements in HTML. In this column I introduce a generic way of presenting elements by outlining their basic characteristics. This way you can have a quick reference of what an element's purpose is and how it is used.

For every element we introduce, we'll talk about its attributes as well. Because some of the attributes that can be used with elements have special uses we haven't discussed yet, I won't cover everything here. An example is attributes that control an element's language, and have a generic syntax. These attributes will be mentioned in the element listings, but I won't explain their use just yet. Stay tuned for our forthcoming tutorials that will delve deeper into these facets of HTML.

In a pinch, we'll cover the following topics:

That doesn't look like much, but in fact we'll cover a great deal of HTML in this tutorial. So, off we go...