Head Rush Ajax

218

Chapter 4

Back to that tree version of the HTML... why did the

welcome text in the <p> element get broken into more

than one text node? Wouldn’t it be easier to use just

one node, and not two or three?

When the browser gets your HTML and

represents it as a tree, the browser has to keep

up with the order of text and elements in the

markup. Otherwise, paragraphs could appear

in the wrong order on the page, and the wrong

words might be bolded or underlined.

Let’s take another look at the markup for the

welcome text:

Order matters to the web browser.

<p>

Welcome to the Webville Tree Farm. We’re still

learning about CSS, so pardon our plain site. We

just bought <a href=

”http://www.headrstlabs.com/books/hfhtml/”>

Head First HTML with CSS &amp; XHTML</a>,

though, so expect great things soon.

</p>

Flip back to

page 213 to

see what Jenny’s

talking about.

Here’s the <p>

element that is

the parent of

all this content.

There’s quite

a bit of text

within the <p>...

...as well as an <a> element

that creates a link.

The <a> element has some

text of its own, also.

order matters

you’re on your way �

219

the document object model

In this case, the easiest way for the browser to keep up

with the ordering of the text and link in the HTML is

to put the first part of the text in one node under the

<p> element, ...