Computer Awareness Quiz: HTML and Web Designing Basics

The correct answer is B, list-style. It is a shorthand property, which means it sets several related properties in a single declaration: the type of the marker, its position and an image to use as the marker, in any order and with the omitted ones falling back to their default values. CSS has several such shorthand properties, among them font, background, margin, padding and border. A is wrong because list-style-type sets only the kind of marker, such as a disc, a circle, a square, decimal numbers or Roman numerals. C is wrong because list-style-position sets only whether the marker sits inside or outside the content box of the list item. D is wrong because list-style-image sets only a picture to be used in place of the standard marker. Each of those three is a single longhand property, and the shorthand list-style is the one that carries all three.

The correct answer is C, the body element. An HTML document has two parts inside the html element, and the body is the one that holds everything the visitor actually sees: headings, paragraphs, images, tables, lists, links and forms. It is a container tag, with an opening and a closing tag, and it encloses the whole visible document. A is wrong because the head element holds information about the page rather than content shown on it, such as the character encoding, the description used by search engines and the links to style sheets and scripts. B is wrong because the title element sits inside the head and supplies the text that appears on the browser tab and in search results, not content in the page itself. D is wrong because meta is an empty tag placed in the head to carry metadata such as the encoding, the viewport setting and the page description.

The correct answer is D, controls. A form is the part of a page that collects information from the visitor, and the individual items placed in it to receive that information are called controls, or form controls: the text box, password box, radio button, check box, drop-down list, text area, submit button and reset button. Most are produced by the input tag with a different value of its type attribute, and each normally carries a name attribute so that the server can tell the values apart. A is wrong because object is a general programming term and also the name of a separate HTML element used to embed external resources. B is wrong because a table arranges data in rows and columns and has nothing to do with collecting input, although tables were once misused to lay forms out. C is wrong because a record is a database term, meaning one complete row of related fields.

The correct answer is A, HyperText Markup Language. Hypertext means text that carries links to other text, so that a reader can jump from one document to another instead of reading in a fixed order, and markup means the system of tags that labels each part of the content for the browser. B is wrong because no language called HighText Machine Language exists; machine language is the binary instruction set of a processor and is unrelated. C is wrong because transfer belongs to HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol, which is the rule set used to carry pages across the network, not the language they are written in; candidates frequently confuse the two expansions, so keep them apart. D is wrong because the third word is Markup, not Making. The language was created by Tim Berners-Lee around 1991 and its standards are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium.

The correct answer is B, Tim Berners-Lee. Working at CERN, the European nuclear research organisation, he proposed a hypertext system in 1989 and by 1991 had written HTML, the first web browser and the first web server, and he went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium, which maintains the standards. A is wrong because Charles Babbage designed the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine in the nineteenth century and is called the father of the computer. C is wrong because Dennis Ritchie created the C programming language and, with Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system. D is wrong because Vint Cerf, with Robert Kahn, designed the TCP and IP protocols and is called a father of the internet, which is a different achievement: the internet is the network of networks, while the web is one service running on it.

The correct answer is B, the line break tag. An empty or void tag has no closing tag because it encloses no content; it simply performs an action at the point where it is written, and the line break tag, written as br, moves the following text to a new line. The other standard empty tags are hr for a horizontal rule, img for an image and input for a form control. A is wrong because the paragraph tag is a container: it has an opening and a closing tag and the text of the paragraph sits between them. C is wrong because the table tag is a container that encloses rows and cells, and leaving it unclosed breaks the layout. D is wrong because the anchor tag is a container too; the words that become clickable are placed between its opening and closing tags, while the destination goes in the href attribute.

The correct answer is A, the h1 tag. HTML offers six levels of heading, from h1 down to h6, and h1 is the largest and most important; it is normally used once on a page, for the page's own title, with h2 for the main sections and h3 for their subsections. B is wrong because h6 is the smallest of the six heading levels, the opposite of what is asked. C is wrong because head is not a heading at all: it is the section at the top of the document that holds information about the page, such as the title shown on the browser tab, the character encoding and the links to style sheets, and nothing in it appears in the page body. D is wrong because the big tag merely increased font size by one step and is obsolete in HTML5, where font size belongs to CSS, not to a tag.

The correct answer is B, href. It stands for hypertext reference and holds the URL of the destination, which may be another website, another page of the same site or a named position within the same page. The text or image placed between the opening and closing anchor tags is what the visitor clicks. A is wrong because src, short for source, gives the file to be loaded by an image, script, audio, video or inline frame element; it brings a resource into the page, whereas href points away from it. C is wrong because alt supplies alternative text for an image, shown when the picture cannot load and read aloud by screen readers, which also makes it important for accessibility and for search engines. D is wrong because link is an element placed in the head to attach an external style sheet, not an attribute of the anchor tag.

The correct answer is B, a comment opening with an angle bracket, an exclamation mark and two hyphens and closing with two hyphens and an angle bracket. The browser ignores everything between them, so comments are used to explain the code to other developers or to switch a block of markup off temporarily without deleting it. A is wrong because two forward slashes begin a single line comment in C, C plus plus, Java and JavaScript, not in HTML. C is wrong because a slash and an asterisk delimit a multi-line comment in those same languages and in CSS, so this is the syntax used inside a style sheet rather than in markup. D is wrong because HTML has no comment element; writing such a tag would simply leave an unknown element in the document, and the text inside it would still be displayed.

The correct answer is B, Cascading Style Sheets. The word cascading describes the way conflicting rules are resolved: styles flow down from several sources, namely the browser's defaults, the author's style sheet and the user's own settings, and the cascade decides which rule wins, with specificity and order of appearance also counting. CSS controls colour, font, size, spacing, borders, background and layout, keeping appearance separate from the structure that HTML provides. A, C and D are wrong because no such expansion is used in any standard; they are written only to look plausible. Candidates should also remember the three ways of applying CSS, namely inline through the style attribute, internal through a style element in the head, and external through a separate file linked in the head, which is the preferred method.

The correct answer is B, the ol tag. An ordered list numbers its items automatically, and its type attribute, or the CSS list-style-type property, decides whether the markers are decimal numbers, lower or upper case letters, or lower or upper case Roman numerals. A is wrong because the ul tag creates an unordered list, whose items carry bullets such as a disc, a circle or a square and have no implied sequence. C is wrong because the li tag marks a single list item and must sit inside either an ordered or an unordered list; by itself it creates no list. D is wrong because the dl tag creates a definition or description list, in which each term, marked with dt, is paired with its description, marked with dd. The three list types and their tags are a standard matching question.

The correct answer is C, src. Short for source, it holds the path or URL of the image file that the browser must fetch and display, and without it the image element has nothing to show. A is wrong because alt gives alternative text, displayed in place of the picture if it cannot be loaded and read out by screen readers for visually impaired users; it is strongly recommended on every image but it does not locate the file. B is wrong because href is the attribute of the anchor and link elements, giving the address a link points to, and it is not used by the image tag at all. D is wrong because title supplies advisory text that most browsers show as a tooltip when the pointer rests on the element; it is optional and decorative. Remember that img is also an empty tag.