ASP.NET 2.0 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 1. HTML Basics

In This Chapter

✓	Generating the right type of HTML
✓	Microsoft support for XHTML
✓	Keeping your HTML clean and tidy
✓	Editing and formatting in Visual Web Developer

Modern Web browsers are far too forgiving. You can point them to any old HyperText Markup Language (HTML) markup and they’ll do a creditable job of rendering what the programmer intended. If all browsers — starting with Mosaic and Lynx — had been sufficiently picky, there’d be almost no sloppy HTML out there. Imagine how precise Webmasters and graphical editors would have to be if browsers stopped cold at the first sign of illegal HTML. The browser would blast the viewer with the message This HTML Violates Standards and Cannot be Viewed.

This chapter looks at some basic HTML issues, especially the newer XHTML standard you should consider for your code. I’ll show you features in Visual Web Developer that make editing code easier, analyze the structure of your HTML document, and beautify jumbled markup. I won’t try to teach you HTML tags here because you probably know them already. At a minimum, a Web developer’s goal should be to keep that pesky HTML close enough to standard usage that a strict browser won’t choke on it. For my part, I try to keep my HTML clean enough that if some guy snoops at my source code, he won’t die laughing. I don’t want that on my conscience!

XHTML Rulez!

The popular HTML 4.01 specification is old by Internet standards. Anything Internet-related that was officially released at the ...