Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Second Edition

Chapter 1. Creating Structured Documents

In this chapter, you meet the first technologies you need to learn in order to write web pages: HTML and XHTML. In fact, what you will really be learning is XHTML—although I will be explaining the differences between HTML and XHTML as we go along. (As I already mentioned, you can consider XHTML simply to be the latest version of HTML.)

The main goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how the primary role of XHTML is to describe the structure of your documents.

In this chapter, then, you:

• Learn the difference between tags, elements, and attributes

• See how a web page uses markup to describe how the page should be structured

• Meet the elements that allow you to mark up text such as headings and paragraphs

• Learn many other elements that can add additional presentation information and phrasing to your documents

• See how to add bulleted and numbered lists to documents

• Are introduced to some core concepts that distinguish different types of elements in XHTML

By the end of the chapter you will have a good idea of how to structure a page in XHTML and will have written your first web pages.

A Web of Structured Documents

Every day, you come across all kinds of printed documents—newspapers, train timetables, insurance forms. The Web is like a sea of documents all linked together; these documents bear a strong similarity to the documents that you meet in everyday life. So let's think for a moment about the structure of some of the documents we see around us, and how ...