Chapter 14: Getting Cozy with Code

Overview

When it comes to Web publishing, there are two types of people: those who like to poke around "under the hood" to see how things work and those who are either worried that they'll break something or just want everything to work without needing to know how.

If you're in the first group, more power to you. You'll find it easy to work in the Expression Web Design and Code views-you may even enjoy moving between the two views as you build your site.

If you're in the second group, you're not alone. HTML may seem intimidating at first, but with a little guidance, you'll find that it's not all that complicated. Expression Web already gives you a sturdy leg up on the process-the code that Expression Web creates is clean, correct, and by the book. So, for you, finding out about HTML will be a matter of tagging along with Expression Web while it serves as your tutor of sorts.

If you're new to HTML, read the first part of this chapter, which introduces some basic HTML concepts that help you understand your HTML pages. If you've never looked at a Web page's underlying code, this section gives you an idea of what's going on. Later sections of this chapter cover the special Expression Web tools and features for working in Code view and with HTML tags. Along the way, you pick up a few tricks for making a page's HTML code or CSS easier to understand and for making quick code edits. We talk about style sheets in detail in Chapter 9.

Tip 

If you're a complete HTML newbie, consider adding a good HTML reference to your computer book library. One of our favorites is HTML 4 For Dummies, 5th Edition, by Ed Tittel and Mary Burmeister (Wiley). You can also find plenty of online tutorials. Here are a few to get you started: http://www.w3schools.com/html and http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/html.

REMEMBER 

When we use the term HTML, we also mean XHTML, the new-and-improved version of HTML. Unless you tell Expression Web otherwise, it writes your pages' code in XHTML.