Head First HTML with CSS

BULLET POINTS
n HTML 4.01 is the HTML standard that is most
widely supported by browsers.
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Doh! We got it
wrong – the boss wants
us to go to strict XHTML, not
HTML. Help! That’s a whole
different language isn’t it?
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is
the standards organization that defines what
“standard HTML” is.
Many browsers have two modes for displaying
HTML: “quirks” mode for old HTML and
standards mode for HTML 4.01.
If you don’t tell the browser which version of
HTML you are using, many browsers will use
quirks mode, which may cause inconsistent
page display in various browsers.
The document type definition (DOCTYPE) is
used to tell the browser which version of HTML
your Web page is written in.
The strict DOCTYPE is used if you are writing
fully compliant HTML 4.01.
Use the transitional DOCTYPE if you are
transitioning HTML that still includes displayoriented
elements and attributes.
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standards, compliance, and all that jazz
The tag in the element tells
the browser additional information about a
Web page, such as the content type and
character encoding.
A character encoding tells the browser the
character set that is used in the Web page.
Most Western-European languages used on
computers today can be represented with the
ISO-8859-1 character encoding.
n The W3C validator is a free online service that
checks pages for compliance with standards.
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Use the validator to ensure that your HTML
is well formed and that your elements and
attributes meet the standards.
n By adhering to standards, your pages will
display more quickly and with fewer display
differences between browsers.
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