Newbie web design help - HTML DOCTYPE declaration

Before you begin coding, you need to declare the type of HTML document you are about to design. Since I'm teaching you how to make HTML 4.0 Transitional documents, your DOCTYPE declaration should look like this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">

Simply copy and paste the above at the top of each HTML document you create, before any tags. Now that you have declared your DOCTYPE, add the following tags into your page: [the rest of your code will go between these two]

<HTML> - this is what a start tag looks like
</HTML> - this is what an end tag looks like

These tags tell the browser which markup language the page is using; now let's look at some other ways to `identify yourself'.