Chapter 2: Work with Text and Lists

Overview

How to…

• Designate headings

• Identify text

• Create bulleted lists

• Build numbered lists

• Create definition lists

• Add special characters

In Chapter 1 you learned how to create a basic Web page. In this chapter you’ll have the chance to put something more than raw text on your page. You’ll also learn about a key issue in using HTML and XHTML: the importance of content versus presentation.

Chances are that if you want to create Web pages, your primary concern is how your Web pages will look. In other words, you are interested in presentation. However, to be able to work with XHTML, you need to understand that content comes first. In fact, HTML was originally developed to assist scientists in linking and transmitting research documents over a computer network. Thus, as you’ll see in this chapter, the elements are designed to reflect their content. Working with headings, simple text elements, and lists is a great way to begin learning this aspect of HTML. These elements are simple, straightforward, and uncomplicated, but they give you good practice for working with tags. Creating lists will allow you to experiment with the concept of nesting covered in the last chapter. Nesting (placing HTML elements inside one another) is an important practice in HTML; it is essential in XHTML. Lists will also provide the opportunity to learn about another important part of working with XHTML, the problem of deprecated elements and attributes. However, before tackling that problem, you’ll find it easier to work with something easy, like headings.