HTML tag, element, and attribute formatting

Elements vs. tags

An element includes the tags, the attributes, and the content, if any. For example, consider the following:

<h1 align=“center”>This is a heading</h1>

In this example, the H1 element consists of the start tag (<h1>), including the align attribute, the “center” value of the align attribute, the content (“This is a heading”), and the end tag (</h1>).

Some elements, such as META and IMG (image), do not have start and end tags; they only have a single tag with attributes.

Formatting guidelines

  • Use all uppercase for element names, and surround the element name with the definite article the and element. Examples are the H1 element and the FONT element.

  • Use angle brackets and lowercase for tags. Examples ...

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