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

Introduction

There are a lot of books about designing and building web pages, so thank you for picking up this one. Why do I think it is different? Well, the Web has been around for over a decade now, and during its life many technologies have been introduced to help you create web pages, some of which have lasted, others of which have disappeared. Many books that teach you to write web pages are revisions of earlier versions of the same book and therefore still take the same approach as the previous edition did. The purpose of this book, however, is to teach you how to create pages for the Web as it is today and will be for the next few years. Then, once you have worked through this book, it should continue to serve as a helpful reference text you can keep nearby and dip into when you need to.

At one time, you needed to learn only one language to write web pages: HTML. As the Web has advanced, however, so have the technologies you need to learn in order to create effective and attractive web pages. As the title of this book suggests, you will be learning a few different languages:

• HTML and XHTML: HTML and XHTML are needed to explain the structure of any web pages. They're used to indicate what text should be considered a heading, where paragraphs start and end, and what images should appear in the document, and to specify links between different pages. As you might be relieved to hear, you shouldn't think of HTML and XHTML as two separate languages. Rather, you can consider XHTML ...