Chapter 1: Understanding Structured Markup

Overview

One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.
—Albert Einstein

Just as a schooled artist must study anatomy, so must a web designer study the structures that are the infrastructure of a design. It is imperative for web designers who want to write great CSS to understand how web markup has evolved, grown, and changed. It’s also critical to have a detailed understanding of how markup works if you want to achieve excellence when writing CSS.

To prepare for that excellence, you’ll learn about the historical emergence of markup and the current need to return to a structure temporarily lost in the frenzy of web design and development in the late ’90s. The web design profession has matured, so best practices and standard methods are emerging to help us create very clean, very powerful means of delivering great sites for use today and well into the future.

In this chapter you will learn:

• The significance of standards

• The meaning of structure

• Ideas central to markup

• In-depth information about HTML and XHTML

• How HTML and XHTML relate to CSS

• How to create structured HTML and XHTML documents