INTRODUCING HTML AND XHTML

 After finishing up the discussions about the world wide web and getting organized, with a large amount of text to read and concepts to digest, you’re probably wondering when you’re actually going to get to write a web page. That is, after all, why you bought the book. Wait no longer

IN THIS LESSON

§  What html is and why you have to use it

§  What you can and cannot to when you design HTML pages

§  What HTML tags are and how to use them

§  How to write pages that conform to the XHTML standard

§  How you can use cascading style sheets to control the look and feel of your pages.

 WHAT HTML IS-AND WHAT IT ISN’T

Take note of just one more thing before you dive into actually writing web pages. You should know what HTML is, what it can do, and most importantly what it can’t do.

 HTML stands for hypertext markup language. HTML is based on the standard generalized markup language (SGML), a much large document-processing system. To write HTML pages, you won’t need to know a whole lot about SGML. However, knowing that one of the main features of SGML is that is  describes the general structure of the content inside documents-rather than it actual appearance on the page or onscreen-does help. This concept might be a bit foreign to you if you’re used to working with WYSWIYG (what you see is what you get) editors like adobe’s  Dreamweaver or Microsoft front page, so let’s go over the information carefully.

HTML DESCRIBES THE STRUCTURE OF A PAGE

HTML, by virtues of its SGML heritage, is a language for describing the structure of a document, not its actual presentation. The idea here is that most documents have common elements-for example, titles, paragraphs, and lists. Before you start writing, therefore, you can identify and define the set of elements in that document and give them appropriate name (see figue3.1).

   document elements.

If you’ve worked with word processing programs that use style sheets (such as Microsoft word) or paragraph catalogs (such as frame maker), you’ve done something similar; each section of text conforms to one of a set of styles that are predefined before you start working HTML defines a set of common styles for web pages: headings, paragraphs, lists, and tables. It also defines character styles such as boldface and code examples. These styles are indicated inside GTML documents using tags. Each tag has a specific name and is set off from the content of the document using a notation that I’ll get into a bit later.