Document Structure Continued

Problem Statement

Every HTML document has a specific set of required tags. Because these are required every time we create a web page, it is valuable to gain a more in-depth understanding of what these tags do and why they are useful and how they work in context to the modern web.

In this lesson, we will be both reviewing what we have learned about a well formed HTML document and expanding a bit on the doctype, html and head tags, as well as introducing how to add comments within our HTML code.

Objectives

Reinforce our understanding of the basic HTML document structure
Introduce HTML comments
Expand our understanding of the head section and its contents
Reinforce our understanding of document structure through creation

Reinforce Our Understanding Of The Basic HTML Document Structure

Let's quickly review the bare essentials of an HTML document. In the provided index.html file, add the following tags:

A doctype tag
Opening and closing html tags
Opening and closing head tags nested inside the html tags
Opening and closing body tags nested inside the html tags

If written correctly, running learn now will pass the first test of this lab. However you will not be done yet! We have to make all the tests pass in order to make the test code happy! Fixing this first one means that we get to attack the next one. Let's get to it!

Let's take a closer look at these tags.

`<!DOCTYPE html>`

At the top of every HTML document, you're always going to start off with the same element, doctype. In the early days of the internet, there were fewer standards, and it was important to declare the specific way we wanted browsers to interpret the file at the top of each file. Netscape and Internet Explorer would look for this declaration and handle the content differently depending on what it found. These days, every current browser is compatible with HTML5, and doctype is mainly used to tell the browser to render the page in standards compliant mode.

The DOCTYPE element, as with all HTML, starts with a < and ends with a >. Uniquely, the doctype tag starts with an exclamation point, !, followed by DOCTYPE, then specifies which version of HTML we want to use. In HTML5, we just write html and the browser interprets the rest of the document as HTML5.

`<html>`

The next element is also always required: <html>. This tells the browser that everything that falls between the opening and closing html tags is to be interpreted as HTML code.

One attribute that is important to include in the <html> tag is lang, which declares what language the webpage is written in. In our case, writing in English, we will use lang="en". This helps search engines to know what language a page is written in. Google, for instance, can use the lang attribute to know when to prompt uses about translating web content.

<html lang="en">
</html>

Introduce HTML Comments

Sometimes we want to leave notes either for ourselves or for other developers inside of our HTML files. An example might be a brief explanation of what some part of the code is doing, or an important message or reminder. We can write comments by wrapping the text we want like so:

<!-- This is a comment! -->

Text included in a comment will not be visible on the webpage, but will be visible in the browser console and .html file.

Expand Our Understanding Of The `head` Section And Its Contents

Inside our html tags, we divide the page into two main sections, head, and body, which both play unique roles. The remainder of our HTML lessons will cover everything within the body section, but before we get there, there are some additional bits of information we need to understand regarding the head. The head section is not visible to a website visitor, but it contains a lot of useful info about our webpage.

In the head section, we place a number of specific tags, most notably:

<link>
<title>

Let's look at each of them in turn:

`link`

The <link> tag is for importing files.

CAREFUL: It's easy to get confused here because web pages are full of links, but also use a <link> tag. "Links" that you click on are located within the <body> element. The <link> tags are located in the <head> element.

Most commonly, we'll use <link> to import CSS files. Like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">

Linking stylesheets this way allows multi-page websites to share a source of styling content for every page, making for a consistent, easy to maintain file structure. Often, on fully developed websites, multiple stylesheets are linked in the head. For example, when doing the final polishing of a web site you might see a series of <link> definitions like:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.1.1/css/bootstrap.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="company.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="engineering-department.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="project-x-launch.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="typography.css">

In this example we're getting some CSS information from the Bootstrap project, we're integrating a company style standard, an engineering style standard, a style motif for the launch of "Project X" and then we're adding some specific rules about font display. You can bring in a lot of information with the <link> tag!

This specific example aside, you'll be learning a lot more about linking files to create stylistic effect in later lessons.

`title`

One more common tag we find in the head is title. The title, as its name implies, is where the title of the webpage should be entered. Text added inside the title tags will appear up on your browser tab. Adding a title for our index.html page would look something like:

<title>Cat Perry's Favorite Cats</title>

Notice that unlike the previous tags we've discussed, title has an opening and closing tag. In most modern browsers, tabs are fairly small, so it is often best to keep the title brief, or it will not be fully visible.

Reinforce Our Understanding Of Document Structure Through Creation

Okay, time to put what we've learned to the test. To complete this lab, you must apply all the tags we've discussed in this lesson. Run learn to see what is required to pass each test. Each test will urge you on.

Conclusion

In this lesson, we've reviewed the basics of document structure, as well as what is typically contained within the head. Using the head section, we are able to add relevant data about our webpage as a whole. As a bonus surprise, by learning how to make our web pages search engine friendly, we've also dabbled a bit into the basics of Search Engine Optimization! We are now ready to take a deeper dive into the visual content of HTML pages.

View Document Structure on Learn.co and start learning to code for free.

ihab-sensei/document-structure-lab-re-coded_istanbul_web003