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The Basics of Building Web Pages and Sites 1

You’ll see many examples of this (and do it yourself) later in this book as you are developing

your own pages.

XHTML (which came out in 2001) was designed to provide a strict structure currently lacking in

HTML coding. The reason for some of the strict structure may be obvious, but some of it may be

needlessly complicated.

One reason for XHTML is so that we know how to detect a properly formatted page.

By requiring end tags, and setting more-strict formatting requirements, the browsers

can better render the pages.

Back in the ‘‘good old days,’’ capitalization of elements didn’t matter — <heaD>, hEaD>,

<Head>, <head>, and <HEAD> were all the same. Size now matters, and tags must all be

lowercase. The format of the single-sided tags has changed, as has the closing of tags. Some

elements have absolute requirements that were optional in the past. Some commands (in the

interest of consistency to the object-oriented paradigm) have been made more attribute-heavy.

The command for embedding a video clip, for example, changed from the simple

<embed src

= ”url”>

to <object data = ”url”type = ”media spec”width = ”x”height = ”y”>

</object>

. Another issue is that a number of commonly used tags are no longer compati-

ble with strict XHTML (such as

label, map, span, input, img, fieldset, iframe, button,

cite, em,andform). You should be aware that there would be compatibility issues with earlier

versions of HTML.

It is very important to also be aware that a Web page will appear differently on different comput-

ers. Some computers may have different screen resolutions than the one used by the designer. A

user may have a browser (remember that there are easily 50 or more of them available) that may

not have the capacity to render all features of the Web page. The latest version of Cascading Style

Sheets (CSS), the range of acceptable colors, or fonts may not be available. All this boils down to

is this: a Web page developer must test the Web page on different browsers to verify the correct-

ness of their appearances, and the designer may also want to design with a version of HTML that

is acceptable to the largest possible audience. This might even mean forgoing some multimedia

or interactive features.

See Chapter 13 for more information on Cascading Style Sheets.

Web Sites

There is no single accepted typology of Web sites. Web sites may be divided into several types

and subtypes, such as the following:

■ Static and dynamic

■ Individual or group

■ Domain types (such as

gov, mil, co, com, net, edu, mobi) grouped by shared interests

(such as download or humor sites, review sites, news sites, or search sites)