Recommended HTML Usage

This part of the HTML Reference shows recommended usage. These constructs are recommended because This section contains many suggestions, rules of thumb, and the like. Where the suggestions are not equivalent to the DTD, the words "should," "may," etc. are linked to futher explanation.

Structure of an HTML document

An HTML document should consist of a HEAD element and a BODY element. The HEAD element contains information global to the document, and the BODY contains a flow of text and other elements.

See also: other legal structures, tolerated structural errors, severe structural errors.

Head Elements

TITLE

The TITLE element should identify the document in a fairly wide context. Its content should fit on one line: it should be less than 72 characters with no linebreaks. It should not contain any '<' or '&' characters.

The title may be used to identify the node in a history list, to label the window displaying the node, etc. It is not normally displayed in the text of a document itself. Contrast titles with headings .

ISINDEX

The presence of the ISINDEX element indicates the document is searchable.

Body Elements

Within the content of these elements, the characters '<', '>', and '&' signal markup in many cases. They should be written as "&#60;", "&#62;", and "&#38;" respectively, to prevent this.

Anchors

A span of text can be marked as an anchor. Anchors can be used as the source of a hypertext link:

Choose this to view a neighbor document.

... or as the destination:

Fred Flinstone

See also: tolerated errors in anchors, severe errors in anchors.

Headings

Headings are used to break the body into sections and subsections. Several levels of headings are defined:

The BODY should begin with an H1 node that identifies the node in a more local context than the TITLE.

H2 and H3 elements designate sections and subsections of a node.

Level four headings are for sub-sub-sub headings

Paragraphs

Text that isn't marked up as some other element forms a paragraph.

Normal paragraphs consist of text consisting of words, sentences, and other stuff. Line breaks have no significance except to separate words. This is still the first paragraph of this section.

This is the second paragraph. Paragraphs are separated by P elements. HTML is relatively flat, and paragraph breaks are not allowed inside lists, headers, anchors, etc.

Lists

Glossaries

term
definition
another term
and its definition, which is long enough that it should wrap around on most screens.

Address

The address element indicates the author or source of the document:

DWC connolly@convex.com

Preformatted Text

The PRE element is used for characters that have already been formatted for a typewriter-like device. Markup is recognized in this element just as in the normal body paragraphs. But after processing tags and entity references, the data is displayed as it appears in the HTML source, rather than using typesetting conventions.

Line breaks are significant, and characters are rendered in a fixed-width font to preserve horizontal formatting.

For example, a portion of a man page might look like:

NOTES
     cat is able to correctly access files larger that two giga-
     bytes in size.

SEE ALSO
     cp(1), ex(1), more(1), pr(1), tail(1)