HTML5 for .NET Developers

Chapter 2. A markup primer: classic HTML, semantic HTML, and CSS

This chapter covers

• Building and reading semantic markup
• Using block and inline elements appropriately
• Styling elements using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Classic markup is the HTML you’re probably familiar with already: <div> tags that have <span> tags inside them, <p> tags that define paragraphs of text, and <a> tags that mark links to other content. But classic markup isn’t semantic markup, which is a simple concept with far-reaching effects on the World Wide Web.

Think of semantic markup as a structural diagram for your pages. You can get a lot of information about a building from its structural diagrams, and the same is true with the semantic layout of a page. You can’t ...