HTML is composed of tags. HTML tags are always enclosed in angle-brackets ( < > ) and are case-insensitive; that is, it doesn't matter whether you type them in upper or lower case. I almost always use upper case, because it makes the tags easier to pick out in a document, but that's just me. You can do whatever you like.
Tags typically occur in begin-end pairs. These pairs are in the form
<tag> ... </tag>
where the <tag> indicates the beginning of a tag-pair, and the </tag> indicates the end. (The three dots indicate an arbitrary amount of content between the tags.) The usual way to refer to each tag is "tag" for the first and "slash-tag" for the second, where tag is the actual name of the tag being discussed.
These pairs define containers. Any content within a container has the rules of that container applied to it. For example, the text within a "boldface container" would be boldfaced. Similarly, paragraphs are defined using a "paragraph container."
Thinking of tag-sets as containers will help in another way: it will help you remember that tags should always be balanced. In other words, you should keep containers nested within each other, just as you would have to do in the real world. Let's try some visual examples where we actually draw the containers:
Why should you worry about this? Well, if you start overlapping containers as shown on the right, about the best you can expect is that the document will be formatted in unexpected ways.
One more thing to keep in mind with regards to containers. Since HTML is based on these structures, it is often the case that the arrangement of text within a container is irrelevant. For example, within a paragraph container, all of the text can be in one long line, or in a series of separate lines, or with every word on its own line, or with every word separated from every other by nineteen spaces. These would all be displayed exactly the same.
Therefore, try to keep in mind this thought: whitespace doesn't matter. (Whitespace is all of the blank areas in a text file--empty lines, extra spaces, and so on.) I'll mention this again when discussing the paragraph tag, and it will crop up in other places. Again: whitespace doesn't matter.
Having said all that, I will now attempt to muddy the waters a bit by mentioning that not every tag in HTML is paired. Some tags, such as the line-break tag, stand on their own (that is, they have no closing tag). These are known as empty tags. As we encounter them, I'll point them out.
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My Wiener Touches the Ceiling (now available on iTunes)
Linear Mode
