This page covers the tags you will most commonly use in HTML that are the most basic although it does not cover page structure. See the next page for that.
Paragraphs
This signifies that the text within should be in its own paragraph. There is a break between each paragraph such as the space between the introduction text and this section.
<p>Your text goes here</p>
<p>Putting more text here would create a gap between them</p>
Line breaks
This is where you want to start a new line but do not want a gap in between them.
Such as here. The previous line was not finished but a new one was started. This is a single tag which does not require closing.
Some text here<br />
This text would be on the line below
Comments
If you want to add some notes into your page you can do it using a comment tag. These are good to remind you what every does or where a particular section starts.
<!-- your comment goes here -->
Comments will not display in the browser although if anyone goes through your sourcecode they will be able to see it so do not put private information in there.
Horizontal Lines
With the advent of borders and more color options in HTML, the horizontal line has become less used these days but is still good to easily section off different parts of the page.
<hr />
Headings
Rather than having to change title text with color, size and weight you can simply replace your <p> tags with title tags. There are 6 different titles that are built into HTML.
<h1>Here is a heading</h1>
<h2>Here is a heading</h2>
<h3>Here is a heading</h3>
<h4>Here is a heading</h4>
<h5>Here is a heading</h5>
<h6>Here is a heading</h6>
CSS has made these tags less needed although they are easy to use and help with search engine optimisation. A blank line is also automatically added after a heading.