Appendix A. XHTML Quick Reference

XHTML is the modern language of the Web. You can use it to create any Web page, whether you’re promoting a local bake sale or running a Fortune 500 company. Chapter 2 introduced XHTML in detail, and since that point you’ve steadily added to your arsenal of XHTML elements.

This appendix provides a quick reference of all the XHTML elements you’ve seen in this book (and a few more). Each entry features a brief description of what the element does, and many entries provide cross-references to more detailed examples in the book. You’ll also get a quick refresher of XHTML character entities, which let you display special characters on a Web page.

XHTML Elements

As you already know, the essential idea behind the XHTML standard is elements—specialized codes in angle brackets that tell a browser how to format text, when to insert images, and how to link different documents together. Throughout this book, you’ve examined just about every important XHTML element in use today. The elements in this reference are arranged in alphabetical order. At the beginning of each section are two key details about the element:

  • Block or inline. You can put a block element directly in the <body> of a Web page. You can’t do that with an inline element—you need to put it inside another block element. Some elements are even more restricted, and make sense only in certain types of containers. For example, the <area> element, which defines an image-map hotspot, is restricted to the ...

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