HTML & CSS Tutorials

Chapter 1 Structuring Documents for the Web

1st → A Short Introduction For The Web Content.

• Take the example of a newspaper.

  • A newspaper consists of several stories or articles (and probably a fair introduction of advertisements, too).
  • Each story has a headline and then some paragraphs, perhaps a subheading, and then some more paragraphs. It may also have one picture or two.
  • The evident thing you can see is that structure of articles on news websites is similar to the structure of articles in newspapers. Each article consists of headings, paragraphs of text, and some pictures.
  • The parallel is quite clear; the only difference is that in a newspaper you may have several stories on a single page, whereas on the web each story tends to get its own page.
  • The news websites also often use homepages that display the headline and a brief summary of the stories.

• Consider another example:

  • You’re catching a train to see a friend, so you check the schedule or time table to see what time the train leaves.
  • The main part of the schedule is a table telling you what times trains arrive and when they depart from different stations. You can probably think of several types of documents that use tables.
  • From the listings in the financial supplement of your paper to the TV schedule, you come across tables of information every day—and often when this information is put on the web, these tables are re-created.

Another common type of printed document is a form.

• For example, Think about a common form from an insurance company.

  • Such a form contains fields to write your name, address, and the amount of coverage, along with check boxes to indicate the number of rooms in the house and what type of lock is on the front door.
  • There are lots of forms on the web, from simple search boxes that ask what you are looking for to the registration forms you are required to fill out before you can place an onlineorder for books or CDs.
  • As you can see, there are many parallels between the structure of printed documents you come across every day and pages which you see on the web.
  • When you are writing web pages, it is the HTML code you start learning in this chapter that tells the web browser how the information you want to display is structured—what text to put in a heading, paragraph, or table, and so on so that the browser can present it properly to the user.

2nd → Introducing HTML5

ven if you have never seen any Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) code, you may know that it is used to create web pages.

     There have been five versions of HTML since the web began, and the development of the language is overseen by an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium or (W3C).

      This book focuses on the latest version of the language, commonly referred to as HTML5. There are two other versions you might encounter.

      These are HTML 4.01, the last major version of the language from December 1999, and a stricter version from 2000 called Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language (XHTML). XHTML is still popular in some applications, so important differences between it and HTML5 will be called out in the text.

NOTE: Generally, you see just the term HTML used in the rest of this book. The one exception is when there is a feature or convention related to a single version.