What Are Tags

This is another in our ongoing series of informative mini articles for your use.

You may have heard of something called HTML, which stands for hypertext markup language.  This language is used in files to describe the structure and content of a web page your computer browser will read, enabling it to display the page to you.

Tags are an essential part of this language.  The many different elements such as paragraphs, tables, or a page titles you see on web pages each have their own tag.  A tag encloses the content applicable to each element, which tells your browser what everything in between the start and finish tags is.  For example:
    <table>content</table>
Notice the word table is enclosed in brackets and appears on both sides of the actual table content, whatever it may be on your web page.  The first table tag is the opening tag and the second is thus the closing tag.  Notice that the closing tag has a back slash preceding the word table.  This is to enable your browser to distinguish between the open and close tags.  

At this point you are probably worried you'll have to learn a huge number of confusing, complex tags.  Relax.  The Shadow Software CMS has been designed to minimize this.  Learn just a few of these and you will be in business managing your web site very soon.

Next we'll look at P tags, which you'll use a lot as you add, edit, or modify what you want to say on your website.