<!DOCTYPE>

PURPOSE: This declaration should be the very first thing in your HTML document, before any other element. This tag tells the browser which HTML specification the document uses.

In HTML 4.0 you can choose between 3 Document Type Definitions (DTD):

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
The Strict DTD excludes the presentation attributes and elements that W3C expects to move to a style sheet. If you need to include presentation attributes in your page you can use the Transitional DTD.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
The Transitional DTD includes presentation attributes and elements that W3C expects to move to a style sheet. This is usually the best to use.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN">
The Frameset DTD should be used for documents with frames. This DTD is identical to the Transitional DTD except for: in frameset documents, the frameset element replaces the body element.

Below is a basic html document. The referenced html tag is in RED. All tags must have a start and a end tag. Most end tags have a / before the tags name, however there are a few that are done differently. The tags that end differently will be noted and highlighted. The order of the start and end tags is also very important to proper display of your page in a web browser.


<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title> The Page Title Goes Here </title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>


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