HTML Topics: Miscellaneous

HTML Topics: Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous

For completeness, we will describe two other types of HTML tag that you will see in most of our documents. These are not required in any documents that you will be creating: they can be thought of as comment lines for browsers and robots. Comment lines themselves are written as follows:

Document Types

You will notice that the first line of most documents now start with a special comment line indicating the document type, e.g.

<!DOCTYPE HTML etc. .... >

This may used to indicate whether the document is, for example, standard HTML or XML (eXtended Markup Language). Since the default is HTML, this line is not essential for most documents.

Meta Statements

The header section of many documents contains further comments in the form of META statements. Perhaps the most useful is the one specifying the character set encoding that the browser should use to display the document: in the example below, the META statements indicates that the ISO-8859-1 (ISO Latin 1) character set should be used (which is actually the default for most web browsers).

<META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" CONTENT="text/html">

Meta statements are often long (e.g. a list of keywords in a document) and may therefore extend over more than one line of text.

Course Material Index

Section Index

Author(s): Jeremy Karl Cockcroft