Practice Review: Creating a Simple Webpage

Try this practice exercise to see how well you understood this unit. 

Read this article to review the concepts of elements, tags, links, and images. Then, follow the instructions to create an idex.html webpage.

You can copy the HTML code for each section and paste it into Notepad (Windows), TextEdit (Mac), or an editor of your choice. Be sure to create a folder structure on your computer modeling the Working with Files section, and you can use your own image. 

Your completed index.html file contains:

  • a document header;
  • an image tag;
  • heading tags;
  • a list; and
  • a link.

This exercise does not count towards your grade. It is just for practice!

Make sure you complete all parts of this example before you continue to the next section, "Introduction to CSS".

Anatomy of an HTML Document

Anatomy of an HTML element

Let's explore this paragraph element a bit further.


The main parts of our element are as follows:

  1. The opening tag: This consists of the name of the element (in this case, p), wrapped in opening and closing angle brackets. This states where the element begins or starts to take effect – in this case where the paragraph begins.
  2. The closing tag: This is the same as the opening tag, except that it includes a forward slash before the element name. This states where the element ends – in this case where the paragraph ends. Failing to add a closing tag is one of the standard beginner errors and can lead to strange results.
  3. The content: This is the content of the element, which in this case, is just text.
  4. The element: The opening tag, the closing tag, and the content together comprise the element.

Elements can also have attributes that look like the following:


Attributes contain extra information about the element that you don't want to appear in the actual content. Here, class is the attribute name and editor-note is the attribute value. The class attribute allows you to give the element a non-unique identifier that can be used to target it (and any other elements with the same class value) with style information and other things.

An attribute should always have the following:

  1. A space between it and the element name (or the previous attribute, if the element already has one or more attributes).
  2. The attribute name followed by an equal sign.
  3. The attribute value wrapped by opening and closing quotation marks

Note: Simple attribute values that don't contain ASCII whitespace (or any of the characters  " '  ` =  < > ) can remain unquoted, but it is recommended that you quote all attribute values, as it makes the code more consistent and understandable.


Nesting elements

You can put elements inside other elements too – this is called nesting. If we wanted to state that our cat is very grumpy, we could wrap the word "very" in a <strong> element, which means that the word is to be strongly emphasized:

<p>My cat is <strong>very</strong> grumpy.</p>

You do however need to make sure that your elements are properly nested. In the example above, we opened the <p> element first, then the <strong> element; therefore, we have to close the <strong> element first, then the <p> element. The following is incorrect:

<p>My cat is <strong>very grumpy.</p></strong>

The elements have to open and close correctly so that they are clearly inside or outside one another. If they overlap as shown above, then your web browser will try to make the best guess at what you were trying to say, which can lead to unexpected results. So don't do it!


Empty elements

Some elements have no content and are called empty elements. Take the <img> element that we already have in our HTML page:

<img src="images/firefox-icon.png" alt="My test image">

This contains two attributes, but there is no closing </img> tag and no inner content. This is because an image element doesn't wrap content to affect it. Its purpose is to embed an image in the HTML page in the place it appears.


Anatomy of an HTML document

That wraps up the basics of individual HTML elements, but they aren't handy on their own. Now we'll look at how individual elements are combined to form an entire HTML page. Let's revisit the code we put into our index.html example (which we first met in the Dealing with files article):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>My test page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <img
    src="images/firefox-icon.png" alt="My test image">
  </body>
</html>

Here, we have the following:

  • <!DOCTYPE html> – doctype. It is a required preamble. In the mists of time, when HTML was young (around 1991/92), doctypes were meant to act as links to a set of rules that the HTML page had to follow to be considered good HTML, which could mean automatic error checking and other useful things. However these days, they don't do much and are basically just needed to make sure your document behaves correctly. That's all you need to know for now.
  • <html></html> – the <html> element. This element wraps all the content on the entire page and is sometimes known as the root element.
  • <head></head> – the <head> element. This element acts as a container for all the stuff you want to include on the HTML page that isn't the content you are showing to your page's viewers. This includes things like keywords and a page description that you want to appear in search results, CSS to style our content, character set declarations, and more.
  • <meta charset="utf-8"> – This element sets the character set your document should use to UTF-8 which includes most characters from the vast majority of written languages. Essentially, it can now handle any textual content you might put on it. There is no reason not to set this and it can help avoid some problems later on.
  • <title></title> – the <title> element. This sets the title of your page, which is the title that appears in the browser tab the page is loaded in. It is also used to describe the page when you bookmark/favorite it.
  • <body></body> – the <body> element. This contains all the content that you want to show to web users when they visit your page, whether that's text, images, videos, games, playable audio tracks, or whatever else.