HTML5 and CSS 3 – Illustrated 2nd Ed. Instructor’s Manual: Unit A Page 7 of 15
• Explain to students that adding spaces before a nested tag makes it appear indented, making
complex code easier to read and elements easier to identify.
• Introduce students to the meta element, which enables a web page author to pass information about
a web page to the user agent that opens it.
• Note that some HTML elements may include attributes, which specify details about a given
element’s properties. For example, the charset attribute specifies the character encoding, which is
the system the user agent should employ to translate the electronic information into human
recognizable symbols, such as letters and numbers.
TEACHER TIP
In order to make sure that all opening tags have corresponding closing tags, recommend that
whenever students write an opening tag they immediately write the closing tag, and only then add
the contents of the tag pair between the opening and closing tags.
FIGURES: A-6, A-7
BOXES
1. Quick Tip: To read more about any HTML tag used in this book, see Appendix A.
2. Quick Tip: To save your work without using the menus, you can press [Ctrl]+[S] (Windows) or
[command]+[S] (Mac).
3. Clues to Use: Describing nesting relationships
An element nested within another element is called a child element of the enclosing element, and the
enclosing element is known as the parent element. In the code shown in FIGURE A-6, the head
element is both a child of the html element and the parent of the title element. In addition, the html
CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES
1. Classroom Activity: Using FIGURE A-6, have students point out opening and closing tags in the
figure. Discuss what information is enclosed by each pair of tags. Have students predict what each tag
stands for, some are obvious such as <head> but others may not be as obvious to students, such as <tr>
for table row. Point out how <tr> is nested in the <table> tag and how the <table tag> provides a clue as
to the meaning of the <tr> tag. Discuss how the indenting of code is similar in structure to a document
outline.
2. Critical Thinking: Based on their personal experience with other languages/systems, ask students to
think about the advantages of splitting a web page into head and body sections.