Editing HTML in Dreamweaver > Understanding basic HTML tags

Understanding basic HTML tags

It can be useful to have a basic understanding of HTML when using Dreamweaver. You can easily see both the HTML code and the visual design at the same time, which gives you the opportunity to figure out how HTML code works. Understanding and being able to modify the code can help you troubleshoot your Web pages. If you are new to HTML, the following explanations provide a brief overview. If you already know HTML, skip ahead to the next section.

HTML is a text markup language. This means that HTML documents are plain text documents that have specific "markup" tags that tell the Web browser how to display the text.

For example, the i tag controls italic text. By placing <i> in your HTML, you tell the browser that the subsequent text should be italic. By placing </i> in your HTML, you tell the browser that the subsequent text should revert to the default text. The tag with a slash (/) is called the closing tag.

Web browsers interpret these tags in your HTML document and display the text with the proper formatting. Some tags have attributes that you can use with them. For example, you can specify the alignment of an image within the image tag: <IMG SRC="image.gif" align="left">. align is an attribute of the image tag.