Almost all HTML programming code is contained within “tags.” Tags are format-related or object-related commands that appear between pointed brackets ( < and > ).

The appearance of format-related tags is as follows:

<TAG COMMAND> Affected Page Elements (Text, Image, etc) </TAG COMMAND>

The appearance of object-related tags is as follows:

<TAG COMMAND>

Tags can be “nested,” meaning that one set of tags can reside inside another set of tags. For example:

<TAG 1> Text <TAG 2> More Text </TAG 2> </TAG 1>

In the above example, “Text” is affected only by the formatting command TAG 1, while “More Text” is affected by both the formatting commands TAG 1 and TAG 2.

Nested tags must be closed in the reverse order that they were opened, otherwise an error will occur. For example, the following arrangement will produce an error:

<TAG 1> Text <TAG 2> More Text </TAG 1> </TAG 2>

So what are the "Tag Commands?" There are quite a few, and we'll be discussing a lot of them as we go along. Let's start off with the essentials in the next section...we'll call them Elements.