Welcome to Dave Arns’ HTML Reference
Copyright © 1997-2006 Dave Arns

As you know, the web is an ever-growing, ever-changing thing. With all the enhancements to HTML over the last few years, it is almost necessary to go to the Web itself when seeking information about the latest thing in HTML coding, rather than buying a paper book that is out of date almost before it gets to the bookstores. And this is exactly what I did: I had dozens of bookmarks to sites all over the world, where people had written up descriptions and examples of this feature or that feature. These were good and definitely useful, and I appreciate the work people went to in order to help out their fellow HTMLers, but these sites were nevertheless scattered all over the world, they exhibited dozens of different writing styles and levels of thoroughness, servers and networks were sometimes down or slow, maybe I wasn't on-line at the moment, etc.

So, I decided to collect the most important information and assemble a reference of sorts, and host it on the web. Originally, this was for my own use only, but as I was getting further along in the project, I realized that other folks might benefit from it also.

As you'll see, these pages have:

Also, color-coding has been used to indicate items that are browser-specific. I only include items that are HTML standards or supported by both of The Big Two (black text), Netscape-specific (green text), or Internet Explorer-specific (red text). In addition to the color coding for browser-specific tags, the same information is imparted by superscripted letters corresponding to the respective browsers: "NC" for Netscape Communicator and "IE" for Internet Explorer. Other than these two non-link special-purpose colors, I use the normal link colors: blue for unvisited links, purplish for visited ones. I have deliberately chosen to exclude the lesser-used browsers (mostly because of the time involved to do the extra research). When and if other browsers gain widespread usage, I will include them as well.

Note that this Quick Reference covers only HTML; it does not cover DHTML (Dynamic HTML), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), or XML (eXtensible Markup Language).

What you're seeing here is a first draft, so if you find errors or omissions, please let me know what the correction is (along with supporting documentation) and I will rectify the situation as soon as possible. I know that I have omitted some of the more obscure or (in my opinion) rarely used tags; if you disagree with my definition of "obscure" or "rarely used," let me know, and I'll insert the tag. Or, if you have usability suggestions, please mention those as well--my goal is to make this as generally useful as possible.

Thanks,
Dave Arns
davea@arnspub.com
www.arnspub.com

See also the ISO8859 table for information on special characters and entities.

(By the way, the "Framify" link in the upper right of all the tags' pages is a quick and convenient way to reinstate the framed environment in case you arrived at one of the pages from a search engine, a bookmark, or the like, and thus the Table of Contents is not visible.)


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