Introduction

The HTML code of your web pages forms the foundation for your site. Properly structured pages act as hubs, coordinating the display of the text and graphics that visitors to your site seek. We'll come back to formatting and displaying graphics in Chapter 5, focusing first on the written content that, for the majority of sites, constitute the meat and potatoes of their online offerings. We'll start by looking at the hidden components of web page code: the tags and server directives that ensure the availability of your content to the widest audience, regardless of their connection speed, physical abilities, or native languages. Then we'll look at some specific, practical strategies for getting the text onto the page in the most user-friendly manner, whether its on statically coded pages or delivered dynamically from a database.