HTML The Definitive Guide (20 page)

Frankly, we prefer the CSS way for the very reason of its forgiving nature, as we explain in Chapter 9,

Cascading Style Sheets, even though JSS is a more powerful and comprehensive accessory. And you

may otherwise become quite familiar with JavaScript by using the language to extend the capabilities of your HTML documents. In that case, adopting JSS with its case-sensitive warts may not be all that daunting, maybe even an easy transition (that's perhaps what Netscape is hoping).

You get a taste of the JavaScript language in the previous JSS example. It is an object-oriented language. It views your document and the browser that displays your documents as a collection of parts ("objects") that have certain properties that you may change or compute. This is some very powerful stuff, but not something that most HTML authors will want to handle. Rather, most of us probably will snatch the quick and easy, yet powerful JavaScript applets that proliferate across the Web and embed them in our own HTML documents. We tell you how ( JSS too) in
Chapter 13,

Executable Content
.

2.11 Frames

2.13 Forging Ahead

Chapter 2

HTML Quick Start

2.13 Forging Ahead

Clearly, this chapter represents the tip of the iceberg. If you've read this far, hopefully your appetite has been whetted for more. By now you've got a basic understanding of the scope and features of HTML; proceed through subsequent chapters to expand your knowledge and learn more about each feature of HTML.

2.12 Style Sheets and

Document

Appearances Can Deceive

Structure of an HTML Document

HTML Tags

Document Content

HTML Document Elements

The Document Header

The Document Body

Editorial Markup

The Tag

HTML documents are very simple, and writing one shouldn't intimidate even the most timid of computer users. First, although you might use a fancy WYSIWYG editor to help you compose it, an HTML document is ultimately stored, distributed, and read by a browser as a simple ASCII text
file.[1] That's why even the poorest user with a barebones text editor can compose the most elaborate

of HTML pages. (Accomplished webmasters often elicit the admiration of HTML "newbies" by composing astonishingly cool pages using the crudest text editor on a cheap laptop computer and performing in odd places like on a bus or in the bathroom.) HTML writers should, however, keep several of the popular browsers on hand and alternate among them to view new documents under construction. Remember, browsers differ in how they display a page; not all browsers implement all of the HTML standards; and some have their own special extensions to the language.

[1] Informally, both the text and the markup tags in an HTML document are ASCII characters. Technically, unless you specify otherwise, text and tags are made up of eight-bit characters as defined in the standard ISO-8859-1 Latin character set. The HTML standard does support alternative character encoding, including Arabic and
Cyrillic. See Appendix E, Character Entities, for details.

3.1 Appearances Can Deceive

HTML documents never look alike when displayed by a text editor and when displayed by an HTML

browser. Simply take a look at any source HTML document off the World Wide Web. At the very least, return characters, tabs, and leading spaces, although important for readability of the source text document, are ignored for the most part in HTML. There also is a lot of extra text in an HTML source document, mostly from the display tags and interactivity markers and their parameters that affect