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The people is a naturally curious. We just love playing with things. One of the best ways to learn Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is to jump right in and start to get into the page layouts. However, if you’re not careful you may end up misunderstanding an important concept or building in problems for later on. In this online resource, we will review some basic, but often misunderstood, concepts and show you how to keep your (X)HTML and CSS clear and well structured.
When we use the term XHTML, we are referring to Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, and when we use the term (X)HTML, we are referring to both XHTML and HTML.
Browser default styles could be overridden so it became possible to mark something up as a heading without it being big, bold, and ugly. Lists could be created that didn’t display as a series of bullet points, and blockquotes could be used without the associated styling. Developers started to use (X)HTML elements because of what they meant rather than how they looked.
Most people don’t think about the foundations of a building. However, without solid foundations, the majority of the buildings around us wouldn’t exist. While this resource is about advanced CSS techniques, much of what we are going to do would not be possible (or would be very difficult) without a well-structured and valid (X)HTML document to work with.
In this section you will learn why well-structured and meaningful (X)HTML is important in CSS development. You will also learn how you can add more meaning to your documents, and by doing so, make your job as a developer easier.
The early Web was little more than a series of interlinked research documents using HTMLto add basic formatting and structure. However, as the World Wide Web increased in popularity, HTML started being used for presentational purposes. Instead of using heading elements for page headlines, people would use a combination of font and bold tags to create the visual effect they wanted. Tables got co-opted as a layout tool rather than a way of displaying data, and people would use blockquotes to add whitespace rather than to indicate quotations. Very quickly the Web lost its meaning and became a jumble of font and table
tags.
HTML was intended to be a simple and understandable markup language. However, as web pages became more and more presentational, the code became almost impossible to understand. As such, complicated WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools were needed to handle this mass of meaningless tags. Unfortunately, rather than making things simpler, these tools added their own complicated markup to the mix. By the turn of the millennium, the average web page was so complicated it was almost impossible to edit by hand for fear of breaking the code.
Something needed to be done.Then along came Cascading Style Sheets. With CSS it became possible to control how a page looked externally and to separate the presentational aspect of a document from its content. Presentational tags like the font tag could be ditched, and layout could be controlled using CSS instead of tables. Markup could be made simple again, and people began to develop a newfound interest in the underlying code.
Building a content module publishing tool reduces the time and effort it takes to publish content. All you need is a Web-based form that includes all the content fields plus publication date and their location in the site. This form lets you publish faster and more often .
Content pages need short, descriptive headlines and blurbs to hook customers into clicking for more content deeper on a site. These hooks also need to be published elsewhere on a site so that visitors will be able to see them.
On most sites, visible content is only the tip of the iceberg. A site's content cannot be revealed in its entirety on just one page. Finding all the content that is buried in a site is a challenge. Customers need MULTIPLE WAYS TO NAVIGATE to find their way around. In addition, from their experience with newspapers and magazines, people are accustomed to seeing headlines and blurbs to introduce every story when they scan for content.
In fact, headlines and introductory paragraphs provide tantalizing leads to pull visitors into the text. According to INVERSE-PYRAMID WRITING STYLE,when an article's conclusion is put in its headline, and the main conclusions are put in the beginning paragraphs, the reader is pulled in to read more.
The style of writing a headline and a short introduction, with each piece hooking the reader further into the story, is what we call headlines and blurbs. Use blurbs to give customers a quick grasp of the content. These blurbs can consist of the first few lines of an article, placed on an opening page to tantalize readers about what lies ahead. Or they can be sentences that stand on their own and provide a complete thought.
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