Task 1: How to Write a Tag

Prior to computer-assisted publishing, you wrote notes to the manuscript’s typesetter directly in the document — hence the phrase to mark up. In an electronic text document, like a Web page, you can’t scribble in the margins; you need another mechanism.

That mechanism is the tag. Hypertext Markup Language is based on tags that mark up text-based documents. They instruct Web browsers how to display content. What we’ll look at in this task is the basic syntax (grammatical rules) for writing HTML tags.