HTML: A Guide to Hard-Coding
Making the Body of Your Page <BODY>
The "body" is everything that you can see in the browser window after the title bar, toolbar and location bar. The body is what you make. It is your page.
Everything that you create must be placed between the <body> and the </body> tags. There are some elements that go in between the <head> and the </head> tag, but we will talk about those in later pages. For now, just remember that everything must go between the body tags, and there can be only one set of body tags.
Every tag has what we call, "attributes." Attributes refine each tag; they narrow and give more information about each tag. Some tags don't have attributes, for example <b>. There is no further information needed for <b>. Bold is bold. However, most tags do have attributes. You do not need to use every attribute a tag has; use only the ones you need.
Some of the attributes of the body tag are:
- background=the image used as a background
- bgcolor=the background color you want, written as either a hexadecimal number or named
- text=the color of the main text on your page
- link=the color of your links; the default in most browsers is blue
- vlink=the color of your visited links. The default in most browsers is purple
- alink=the color of your links as you actually click on them.
Try typing in a background color in your document.
Now you need to view your changes in a browser.
You MUST always re-save your html document after every change. If not, you will not be able so view it in your browser.
Click File and then Save, and then switch to your browser.
Once you are in your browser, click either "reload" or "refresh." You should see the changes immediately.
A couple of points to remember: It doesn't matter if you type in small letters or all CAPS, just try to be consistent. Make sure you put in lots of spaces between lines of code--it will be much easier to edit later. If you spell anything incorrectly, it will not work. So, if something doesn't work, check your spelling!!
