HTML Cheat Sheet
HTML documents have a tree structure,
with each element parenthesized
by a start tag <element>
and an end tag </element>.
Heading Elements
The heading elements generally appear in the following order.
<html>
- An HTML document.
<head>
- The document heading.
<title>text</title>
- The title should include the context of the document,
such as the institution or author.
<link ...>
- The relationship of this document to other documents.
Examples include predecessor and subdocument.
This is not yet defined.
</head>
Leading Body Elements
The leading body elements generally appear in this order.
<body>
- The document body.
<h1>text</h1>
- The level one heading corresponds to the title,
but generally does not include the context.
There should be only one level one heading.
Sectioning
<hn>text</hn>
- A level n heading, n>1.
<p>
- The paragraph separator.
(It will become a start of paragraph in later versions.)
<pre>text</pre>
- Preformatted text in fixed-width font.
<blockquote>text</blockquote>
- Block quoted text.
<address>text</address>
- An address.
<br>
- line break
<hr>
- horizontal rule
<!-- text -->
- Unformatted, undisplayed comments.
Note, however, that readers may view the source and see the comments.
Lists
<ul> <li>text ... </ul>
- Unordered list.
<ol> <li>text ... </ol>
- Ordered list.
<dl> <dt>term text<dd>definition text ... </dl>
- Definition list.
Semantic Fonts
<em>text</em>
- Emphasized text.
<strong>text</strong>
- Strongly emphasized text.
<dfn>text</dfn>
- A word or text being defined.
<cite>text</cite>
- Title text of books, films, etc.
<code>text</code>
- Snippets of computer code
text.
<kbd>text</kbd>
- User keyboard entry text.
<samp>text</samp>
- Computer status message text.
<var>text</var>
- Metasyntactic variable text.
Presentation Fonts
<b>text</b>
- Bold text.
<i>text</i>
- Italic text.
<u>text</u>
- Underlined text on some browsers.
<tt>text</tt>
- Teletype text.
<blink>text</blink>
- Blinking on some browsers.
Character Entities
< is <
> is >
& is &
" is "
is a non-breaking space
ö is ö (lowercase o with an umlaut)
ñ is ñ (lowercase n with a tilde)
È is È (uppercase E with a grave accent)
see also ISO Latin 1 Entities in HTML
Anchors and References
<a name="label">text</a>
- An anchor definition for text.
<a href="URL">text</a>
- An anchor reference where URL is the uniform
resource locator and text is the reference text.
- scheme
://host:port/path/filename.extension#label
- A Uniform Resource Locator where
- scheme
:
- is one of
file:, ftp:, http:,
gopher:, WAIS:, news:, or
telnet:. The default is http:.
//host
- defaults to the host of the current document.
:port
- defaults to ?what?.
/path/
- defaults to the current path.
- filename
- defaults to the current file.
.extension
- is one of
- text
.txt, .html
- static picture
.ps (Postscript) .gif, .tiff,
.xbm (X bitmap), .jpg, .jpeg
- motion picture
.mpg, .mpeg, .mov (Quicktime)
- sound
.aiff, .au
#label
- is a label reference within an HTML file.
The default is the top of the file.
<img align=alignment
src="URL.ext"
alt="text">
- An in-line image reference.
- alignment
- Chose
top, middle, or omit for bottom.
.ext
- Choose
.gif or .xbm (X bitmap).
For non-imaging browsers, text will be substituted for
the image if present.
Author Identification
<![CDATA[
<hr>
<address>
<a href="http://www.cs.orst.edu/~crowl/">Lawrence A. Crowl</a>,
<a href="/cgi-bin/mailform?crowl@cs.orst.edu">crowl@cs.orst.edu</a>,
5 April 1995
</address>
]]>
Trailing Elements
</body>
- End of body.
</html>
- End of HTML document.
Lawrence A. Crowl,
crowl@cs.orst.edu,
7 September 1995