Chapter 2 >
Although many books exist about HTML today, notably on new HTML5 features, I've found few resources that teach HTML from the ground up in succint and modern fashion. Too many books spend too much time on history, legacy code and esoteric features that belong on Wikipedia and the HTML spec itself.
In an effort to provide a free alternative and technically approachable resource for learning HTML, I've decided I would write a series of articles on my blog. Eventually, it ended up in this book project.
While the WHATWG already provides for-developers HTML documentation, they do not provide for-beginners documentation. This guide tries to provide just that.
Although aimed at beginners, this guidebook was written with the savvy computer user in mind; i.e. an unexperienced computer user wouldn't be learning HTML. You need to know the difference between a Web browser and Google Search, so to speak.
Just like HTML itself, this guidebook was designed to be platform-agnostic, but only in which case the platform in question is capable of handling standard HTML5. However, because support for various technologies varies, a mention will be made for each element about their level of support in different Web browsers.
The use of markup languages stems from early computing where the only way to store information was via raw text. To ensure this digital text would remain meaningful, markup languages were invented to "mark up" raw text into meaningful text.
From this idea, the GML markup language was developed at IBM and served as the basis of the ISO standard SGML, which itself served as the basis for HTML and XML.
Today, HTML is used as the markup language for Web pages, while XML is used as a general markup language customized for various applications, including HTML. The XML application of HTML is called XHTML.
The constructs used to create the markup are called elements.
XHTML5 is the XML serialization of HTML. In short, it's HTML5, but with the syntax rules of XML. You'll be learning more about the syntax differences in Chapter 2: Syntax.
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© Copyright 2012 Etienne Levesque Guitard.
You are granted a license to use, reproduce and create derivative works of this document for non-commercial purposes only.