Tags are the heart of HTML. They are pretty much all that HTML is, actually. So what are they? They are anything enclosed in <> these signs. So what do you do with them? You put one of these babies on either side of lumps of text to in effect "divide" the page into these sections. Opening tags are required at the beginning of the block of text, and closing tags are sometimes required at the end of it.

I'm just going to use the paragraph tag as an example. The opening tag for a paragraph is <p>. Any text after this will be formatted into the shape of a paragraph. To end that paragraph, place the paragraph tag with a slash in it at the end of the text, like so: </p>. However, many tags don't require a closing tag. But if you are giving that tag a property you don't want carried over into other text, then it's best to close it.

Most tags also have modifiers that they can accept. Modifiers are inserted into tags as follows: <tag_name modifier_name="modifier_value">. Modifiers do all kinds of stuff, such as change the color or font of text to adding borders to tables to telling forms how to handle the information they recieve. This will be the bulk of each lesson; telling you which modifiers work with the given tags.

So lets begin this thing by telling you how to get started. HTML pages are completely contained within HTML tags: <html> and </html>. Everything on each page will be in between those guys. Next is the head tag, which contains a number of things. But for our purposes, the title is in there. Head tags are:<head> and </head>, and title tags are: <title> and </title>.

Then you've got the body tags. These contain the entire visible area of the web page. They are, if you hadn't guessed, <body> and </body>. Let me show you what EVERY page you ever make in HTML will pretty much look like: 

<html>
<head>
<title>
This is the text that appears in the
 blue bar at the top of the window!
</title>
</head>
<body>
This is the text that appears in the window.  
</body>
</html>

As I said, EVERY page will have this template, with many, many additions. Before proceding, lets look at some URL concepts.