HTML is a little different because it is meant to do more than just display text in certain formats. Remember--HTML is a Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). And a SGML is designed to provide a uniform scheme to "markup" electronic documents. The uniformity is key because lots of different folks are marking up these documents--if they ddidn't have some agreed upon scheme for doing so, then others wouldn't be able to interpret those documents correctly.
HTML is based on the same idea: If you provide a uniform set of standards, then everyone will be able to read the documents. And, along the same lines, if everyone knows the standards, then everyone can create new Web browsers to view those documents. No one Web browser would determine how documents could be displayed. It's a little like a world in which Microsoft Word wasn't the only word processing program (huh?!). And in which all word processors could read and correctly display all documents, no matter what application created them. Word Perfect would read Word would read Word Star would read Claris Works, etc., etc., etc.
Because their goal was to create a standard for documents that would work with different platforms (IBM, Mac, Unix) and with different browsers (Lynx, Mosaic, Cello, MacWeb, Netscape), the creators of HTML decided that it was much more important to say something about a document's content than it was to concentrate on exacting descriptions of how to present the document. So, they created "logical tags".
As I said on the Homepage Assignment, logical tags can be divided into two categories: tags that designate headings and tags that designate how characters will be displayed. Headings designate the beginning of a section or subsection of a document:
They should not be used simply because you want to enlarge and bold text. Such physical formatting can be done using the <B> and <FONT SIZE = +1> tags.
Which one is the heading?