HTML Files, Elements And Tags, And Document Structure

Even with high-quality Web editor applications, it’s good to know how to do markup. While there are plenty of excellent HTML introduction tutorials out there on the Web, most of them teach with deprecated (obsolete) markup. Knowing about deprecated markup is helpful so you can read the source of older Web pages. But why learn to do things the old way and then have to switch to the standard way?

In the first part of this week’s introduction to HTML and XHTML, learn about HTML files, elements and tags, and document structure. If this sounds like gibberish, it won’t for long. If you have colleagues, friends, or family driving you nuts with their basic HTML questions, maybe this series will help. Part II comes next time.

The Web Design guide provides a background on SGML, HTML, XHTML, and XML; it even includes a quick and dirty intro to XHTML. While all that is nice, some shouts of “Start at the beginning!” echo as someone, somewhere is new to markup languages.