Boot Camp

Web Authoring Boot Camp
8
HTML/XHTML Basics
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the starting code language for building the most
basic of web pages. You need to really know and understand this to understand and apply
more complex languages and scripts for making later web pages dynamic. The current
version is HTML4.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable
form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C,
and several other related specifications. XML’s design goals emphasize simplicity, generality,
and usability over the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via
Unicode for the languages of the world. Although the design of XML focuses on documents,
it is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures, such as in web
services.
XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) moves past HTML to the more precise,
manageable, and World Wide Consortium (W3C) validated current standards for
basic web coding. It is a blend of HTML and XML which results in organized and consistent
HTML code, allows clean validation, and keeps you away from deprecated tags
and quirky practices that give browsers (and you) huge headaches. The current version is
XHTML 1.0.
HTML5 is currently being used in some part and the boundaries of browser interpretation
pushed as far as designers and developers can go. HTML4 and XHTML 1.0 in
terms of additional functionality for websites that is now provided by Flash, JavaScript,
and plug-ins. HTML5 adds more markup syntax for documents, especially for defining
sections of a web page. It includes a bunch of new tags that this book will not cover for
beginner’s use because, as hot as HTML5 looks for more web “devsigner” websites and
mobile platforms, it is currently not fully supported at a consistent and reliable level by
the current browsers. However, we will look at the non-developer aspects of HTML5,
like the doctype and charset which are supported by the W3C Validator and Google/
search engine indexing. We will also look at what can be reliably added to your web work
at this point, and offer resources for you to keep your eye on – tutuorials, examples, standardization
reports, etc.
Our aim in this book is to focus on XHTML 1.0, because it meets current standards for
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