Tag: HTML Tags

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HTML PROGRAMMING TUTORIALS WEB BROWSER WEB DEVELOPMENT

HTML Meter Tag Explained

HTML Meter Tag is a new type of HTML tag introduced in the HTML 5 specification. So chances are, you are not so familiar with it. Right? But do not worry, as we will start exploring everything there is to the HTML meter tag in this article. So you will soon be able to start using it in your websites and web apps.

Sounds good? Great! Then let us get started!

What Is An HTML Meter Tag?

So consider this situation. You are creating a dashboard in your web app that, among many other things, also shows the storage space left in your hard disk. Now how will you go about designing it?

So the chances are, you might create a custom HTML element that is styled using its CSS properties to display the storage space graphically. But even if it seems a valid solution, problem is you need to keep creating such custom HTML elements frequently. And if you are designing a web app having a dashboard showing multiple data, these custom elements will only increase. Right?

HTML5 Meter tag explained with example
HTML5 Meter tag explained

So then what is an easier solution for this problem than that? Well for one, would it not be easier if we had a built in HTML element to display such measurements? With the growing number of web apps with dashboards, having such a prebuilt HTML element makes sense, right?

Well, that is precisely what the HTML5 specification guys decided to do! And that is how the HTML Meter tag came into picture!

So What Does The Meter Tag Do?

The idea was to create an HTML element that can be used to display any measured values within it. So that is what a Meter tag does!

A Meter tag can be used to display a measured value within a given range of values.

Sounds good? Great! Then let us move on to take a look at an example piece of code that uses the Meter tag. Shall we?

HTML Meter Tag Example

So for this example, let us assume that we want to display the size of a cloud storage space. For brevity, let us say we want to display the size of our mail box which is currently at 66% full. Alright?

So how do we go about using the Meter tag to display this value? And how will the displayed result look like?

To answer these questions, let us start writing our code as shown below:

<!DOCTYLE html>

<html>
  <head>
  </head>
  <body>
    <label for="disk">Disk Usage: </label>
    <meter id="disk" value="0.7">70%</meter>
  </body>
</html>

Now, if you copy the above piece of coded into a new file and save it as meter.html, what do you see?

Go ahead and try it out! I want you to do it yourself so that you become familiar with how to use the HTML meter tags.

Did you try it? If you did, you should see that the result looks something like this:

70%

Conclusion

So that is it! That is how the Meter tag works! You just feed the right value into the “value” property of the Meter tag and it will display the meter gauge accordingly. Go ahead and test it out with few more different values and see how the gauge changes yourself.

Finally, if you have any questions or suggestions, let me know in the comment below! So until next time, take care!

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HTML STATIC WEBSITES TUTORIALS WEB DEVELOPMENT WORDPRESS

Difference Between Link & Anchor Tag In HTML

HTML provides us with 2 different tags called the Anchor tag (represented by <a>) and the Link tag (represented by <link>). But what is the difference between the two? Can they be interchanged with one another? We will explore these queries in this article.

What is an HTML Anchor tag?

An anchor tag is used in an HTML file to help us link our HTML file’s texts to certain other web pages. In other words, it helps in the creation of hyper texts (<a>these are the hyper texts</a>) in HTML documents.

These other web pages that is linked into by the anchor tags can be present within the same website, or can be residing in a different website on a different web server altogether. But what is important is that the Anchor tags <a></a> are responsible for linking different web documents together through hyper texts and help user navigate from one web page to other in a simple mouse click!

It must be noted that all anchor tags are present only within the <body></body> section of an HTML page. They are never used in the <head></head> section of the HTML page. This is because the primary function of the Anchor tags <a></a> is to let web page users to move from one page to the other page. As the web page users can never see the content of <head> section, anchor tags are never used there!

So, in other words, we can say that Anchor tags <a> are used in the user visible part of an HTML web page so that the web page user can click on the Hyper Texts created by these Anchor tags and move from one web page to another.

What is an HTML Link tag?

On the other hand, our web page is not just made up of HTML web pages, but consists of one or more of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that are used to style the web page. It also consists of one or more Javascript files to provide interactive functionalities to the web page. These CSS files and the Javascript files are thus part and parcel of the web page and hence need to be linked to the web page. This is achieved using the <link> HTML tag.

The <link> HTML tag is hence used to link up all external resources such as CSS and Javascript files associated with a web page. This linking does not need to be seen by the final user as he only needs to get an integrated HTML web page rendered. As a result, the linking of these files, done through the use of <link> tag is done in the <head> meta section of the web page.

So these were the difference between Link tag Vs Anchor tag in HTML. Each of these tags have very unique functionalities to fulfill in their own roles and cannot be used interchangeably as we suspected in the beginning of the article.

With this, hope it became clear on the differences between Link and Anchor tags’ purpose in the creation of an HTML document. If you have any more queries or doubts between Link and anchor tags, let me know in the comments below and I will try to clarify your doubts.

Until next time, happy coding! 🙂

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HTML TUTORIALS

List Of HTML Empty Elements

What are HTML Empty Elements?

Empty elements of HTML code are those HTML elements that have start tags but do not have an associated end tags. So these are the HTML elements which can contain only attributes associated within them but no content by themselves.

Sometimes, HTML Empty elements are also called as Void Elements of HTML.

Some of the interesting features of Empty Elements of HTML includes:

  • They can never have raw text or CDATA associated within themselves.
  • They can never have any additional child nodes in the DOM tree.

A list of HTML Empty Elements are as follows:

  • <br> Insert A Line break
  • <hr> Insert A Horizontal line
  • <img> Insert an image from a file in the path defined by its “src” attribute
  • <meta> Defines the metadata of a web page
  • <source> Insert a media file
  • <link> Used only in a document header to link in an external resource
  • <input> Used to declare an input element to accept user input.

Hope this gave you good idea about what HTML tags are considered HTML Empty elements. I will continue to write further on more such lesser known information related to web development in future articles as well.

Until next time, happy coding! 🙂

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HTML STATIC WEBSITES TUTORIALS WEB SERVER WORDPRESS

What does Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) even mean?

HTML is the language used to develop web pages for the world wide web. But what does HTML even mean? We know that HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, but what does each of these terms even signify? This post will try to discuss upon each of these words and their significance in the world of the web.

What is Hyper Text?

Hyper text refers to the ability of web pages to link with each other, within the same website or between websites on the internet.

What is a Markup Language?

HTML is a markup language. But what does markup language even mean? It means that all the building blocks that make up a HTML web page are made up of HTML elements defined by HTML markups. In other words, HTML markups are special tags used to define all the HTML elements that make up a web page. These HTML markups includes tags like <head>, <title>, <body>, <footer> etc.

Why use semantic HTML markups for your web page?

With the recent HTML 5 specification, there has been an increase in the amount of these HTML markups (or tags) defined by the specification so that there are more semantically meaningful HTML markup tags available to define a web page. These new semantically appropriate HTML markup tags help improve the readability and understanding of the sections of these web pages by machines (aka algorithms) such as search engines.

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CMS HTML STATIC WEBSITES TUTORIALS WEB SERVER WORDPRESS

Introduction To HTML Anchor Tag

Brief structure of an HTML Anchor tag
Typical HTML Anchor tag usage in web documents

Anchor tag is an HTML tag that is used to mark the beginning and end of a hyperlink text in the HTML document.

A website is made up of one or more HTML documents that contains all the information parts of the website. But word wide web as a whole mainly works because of the ability of these HTML web documents to link (or refer) to each other. This inter-linking of web pages is achieved by using the HTML anchor tags.

A typical structure of an anchor tag looks like this:

<a href="https://muddoo.com" title="Muddoo Home">Muddoo</a>
Brief structure of an HTML Anchor tag
Typical HTML Anchor tag usage in web documents

From the above, we note that an anchor tag starts and ends between notations like <a> and </a>. In other words, HTML anchor tags have both opening and closing tags. Text between this opening and closing tags is called the anchor text and is responsible for taking the user to a new document upon being clicked. In the above example, “Muddoo” is the anchor text.

But where does the user go on clicking the Anchor text? This is determined by the href attribute of the HTML anchor tag. The url in the href attribute of anchor tag is the destination web page’s address where the user will be taken to.

In addition to href attribute, the HTML anchor tag also has another attribute called “title”. The title attribute of the HTML anchor tag holds a piece of text that the user will see upon hovered over by the mouse. It is also helpful as an accessibility feature for people using screen readers as it gets read out by the screen readers.

Finally, there are also a few other attributes such as “target” attribute which provides additional functions such as determining if the destination web page is to be opened in the same window or a new window. These type of additional attributes can be looked upon in the official w3c html specification document.

But all in all, the Anchor tags are the fundamental elements of the world wide web that weaves the inter-connected paths between various web documents that helps the web users to seamlessly navigate between various websites and documents without any hassles.

Hope this gave a brief introduction to the HTML anchor tags. HTM Anchor tags are tags that are going to be used regularly while creating a HTML web page so having a clear understanding of its structure and how it works becomes essential. In the same line, I will continue to document more about other HTML tags in the future that are bare essential for web development.

Until then, happy coding!

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HTML STATIC WEBSITES TUTORIALS WEB SERVER WORDPRESS

What is DOCTYPE in HTML? Why do we use it?

When we sit down to write an html document, one of the first line of code we write is <!DOCTYPE html>. But what does this line do? What is significance of this line to a web browser? What happens if we miss including the DOCTYPE tag? Is it even a tag in the first place? We will answer these questions in this article.

What is DOCTYPE in HTML?

DOCTYPE is a type of directive that tells our web browser what type of document it is dealing with. As there are multiple versions of HTML documents that a web browser need to deal with, each following a different version of HTML definition standards or non HTML documents such as XML files, mentioning the “type” of this particular document helps a web browser to decide and adjust itself to render the specified document appropriately.

What happens if the DOCTYPE is not mentioned in an HTML document?

Specifying the DOCTYPE of a document will help a web browser to make appropriate decisions in rendering that file to its user successfully. In the event a web document does not have appropriate DOCTYPE specified, the web browser will try to make a best guess and try to render the document accordingly. However, a result of this could be that the rendering might not be happening in the most optimal way and as a result, some of the documents might not get rendered properly.

Is DOCTYPE even a HTML tag?

Actually, No! 😮

DOCTYPE according to HTML specification is not a HTML tag, but a declaration for the browser to make use of.

Does DOCTYPE have an end tag?

The answer is NO. DOCTYPE is not a HTML tag and does not have an explicit end tag to itself.

In the earlier days, web documents used DOCTYPE declaration effectively to let the browser know what type of HTML standard specification the document was following. As a result, the first line of a web page that declared the DOCTYPE had a very lengthy string to it, something like this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

But these days, with most of the websites using HTML 5 specification, the actual usage of DOCTYPE has become more or less redundant and hence we can get away by just declaring the DOCTYPE as:

<!DOCTYPE html>

and browser will still be able to handle it perfectly.

Hope this gave a bit of clarity on some of the doubts you had around DOCTYPE declaration in HTML. If you have an inputs or queries regarding it, don’t hesitate to ask about it in the comment section below!

Until then, Happy Coding!