Step by Step HTML5

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What Is HTML?
Simply put, it’s because doing your own coding is the best way to learn HTML. In this
book you’ll build a Web site from the ground up, writing every line of code yourself. It’s
slower and not as much fun as a fancy graphical program, but it’s great training.
The last chapter of this book shows how to use Microsoft Expression Web to create Web
content, and you may eventually choose to move to a program like that. However, you
will be a much better Web designer—and understand what is going on in design programs
much better—if you tough it out with Notepad in the beginning.
Choosing an HTML Version
Different versions of HTML use different tags for some types of content, although they
more similar than different overall, especially at the beginner level covered in this book.
Here’s a quick comparison of the HTML versions you may encounter:
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HTML4 A very stable, universally accepted code set, which is also fairly forgiving
of small coding errors. Using HTML4 codes is desirable when compatibility with all
browsers is important.
XHTML A strict, standards-based implementation of HTML4 created with XML
(eXtensible Markup Language). XHTML coding uses the same codes as HTML4, so it
is compatible with the same browsers as HTML4. (See the sidebar about XML on the
next page for more information.)
HTML5 A revised code set that builds upon HTML4 to add new capabilities.
HTML5 offers many dramatic improvements in the areas of application handling
and multimedia, but a lot of those features are beyond the scope of this book. In
terms of basic coding, which is what this book teaches, the biggest difference is
that there are new specific codes for different types of content that were previously
handled with more general codes. For example, HTML5 has and
tags for inserting multimedia content, whereas HTML4 inserts all types of multimedia
content via a generic tag.
Since this is a book about HTML5, it might seem like an obvious decision to do your coding
using HTML5 tags, but it is not quite as simple as that in real-world situations.
A good Web browser should ideally support every tag and every version of HTML it can,
because the various HTML version differences should be completely invisible to the Web
site visitor. However, HTML5 is so new that not all browsers have caught up to it yet, and
people who use older computers may not have the latest version of a browser even if an
HTML5 compatible version is available.
Tip Here’s a site that lists what HTML5 features are supported by each version of each of the
popular Web browsers: http://caniuse.com.