Python Tutorial: HTML Tags and Attributes

Key Takeaways

in the last lesson we became familiar with the tree-like structure of HTML and learned how to navigate the tree to access specific elements we did not pay much attention to the actual HTML tags nor the specifics of HTML syntax beyond this tree like structure in this lesson we delve deeper into some of the HTML specific syntax you may ask why we want to get more specific here it turns out that sometimes we want to access information that is held within the HTML tags themselves we often want to access this info in order to find the URL pointed to by a specific link on the site or because it can potentially give us another method to select specific HTML elements with a more friendly syntax than traversing the entire HTML tree to start let's look at an abstract tag formatting there are many HTML tag types that follow the same formatting we have already seen 3 tag names the HTML div and P tags these tags can also contain attributes which provide special instructions for the contents contained within that tag specific HTML attribute names are followed by an equal sign followed by information which is being passed to that attribute within the tag in well formatted HTML the information is in quotes sound confusing don't worry to look at a specific example let's consider a div tag with two attributes ID and class we chose these two attributes here because they arise frequently in practice in well form HTML the ID attribute can be used as a unique identifier for the tag element in this case the ID unique ID should only belong to this specific develoment giving us a quick way to identify it the class attribute some class can also help us identify this div element but even in well formatted HTML it doesn't need to be unique note tag needs to have an ID nor a class attribute but all tags can be given an ID and a class a point that will find its way into a future lesson is that a tag can belong to multiple classes and this is done when the class attribute that is the quoted text assigned for that class has multiple class names separated by spaces in fact this div tag would belong to both classes sum and class let's look at another example the a tag name here is the specific tag for hyperlinks the links we click on within a website to redirect somewhere the most important attribute within these hyperlink tags is the href attribute this attribute is used to identify the URL where the hyperlink redirects - it turns out that there are many allowable tag types in HTML and many allowable attributes which sometimes depend on those tag types we will not be able to nor want to go through each and every one of these in this course rather we're going to learn techniques that will be applicable regardless of the tag with a special focus on ID class and href attributes we saw in this lesson building up methods that can easily apply to other attributes as you encounter them and don't worry even with only those three attributes we will get a lot of traction so what did we learn in this lesson we focused on HTML specific syntax learning the general abstract structure of HTML tags we saw how to identify the tag naman attributes within those tags now let