(Shamelessly stolen from Bill Sverdlik!)
Static web pages are created via HTML. Read [here]
for a simple introduction and follow the link for more advanced techniques.
In all web development, one should strive for compliance with XHTML. To fully
understand what XHTML means, one needs an introduction to XML and DTD. Read
about XML, DTD, and XHTML [here]. Once
you read (and understand) about these topics, you will find you will have less
problems with your web pages. IMPORTANT: For this class, all web pages
must conform to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional DTD. How do you ensure this
? Simple: post your page on the web and then invoke a validator like [this]
. IMPORTANT (yet again!): I have had many situations where I find a problem
in a student's web page that he/she did not know about. The common response
from the student is that "it worked in my browser", and sure enough, it did.
The problem is that browsers take many liberties with HTML documents that violate
the specification. I highly recommend the following: check your web pages
in all browsers available (and I can think of at least two popular ones) and
validate your documents with a validator. In fact, you may consider this a requirement
of this course!!
As markup languages evolve, standards are developing to seperate content from
display properties. In fact, the latest XHTML specifications don't even permit
a font tag in the file. Instead, display properties are moved over to a seperate
file. The current standard for this is called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Read about CSS [here]. An easier explanation of CSS may be found [ here ] .