HTML/XHTML, CSS, and Dreamweaver Manual

Introduction

This guide will provide you with a basic understanding of HTML, XHTML, and CSS. It will also introduce you to Dreamweaver, an editing tool used to create Web pages. You do not need to have prior knowledge of any of the markup languages or Dreamweaver in order to use this guide. However, if you have had some exposure to HTML, you already have a tremendous head start because the language of XHTML is the same as HTML, with the exception of a few rules that must be followed to create a valid XHTML document.

While this guide describes some of the HTML/XHTML tags that you will use most often, it is not meant to be a reference guide. At the end of the guide is a list of resources, some of which are meant to serve as references for the markup languages we will be exploring. The goal here is to get you started on the basics of how use these tools so you can extend your knowledge of them as far as you would like.

Section 1 - HTML/XHTML

XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) is basically an extension of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). It is a bit stricter than HTML because XHTML was developed to be a transition from HTML to XML (Extensible Markup Language), which has much more rigid standards than HTML. Everything you will learn about
HTML applies to XHTML except for the few rules that are required for a valid XHTML document. First we will discuss the “language” of HTML, and then we will examine how HTML and XHTML differ.

HTML is a markup language comprised of a set of tags that tell a browser how to display content. HTML can be written in any text editor including a multitude of HTML editors such as Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver can be used to follow along in the examples used in this guide, and it is advisable to do so since it will help you to learn the syntax of HTML and XHTML. To learn how you can use Dreamweaver to enter code and see how it will display in a browser, refer to section 3.

HTML does not recognize traditional carriage returns in text. It will run text across the entire width of the screen unless a line break is specified using the line break tag or the width of a text tag is specified so that the text only extends to a certain width of the screen. Figure 1 shows the words one, two, three, four listed vertically in an HTML document. Figure 2 shows how the those words would appear in a browser. You can see that HTML does not retain the line breaks we placed in the code.

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