Chapter Three: Markup

In Chapter 2, we considered the important concept of separating structured content from presentation and behavior. In this chapter, we’ll look at the content layer and how content can be marked up for the web using HTML. Then, in Chapter 4, we’ll look at ways of presenting this content using CSS.

The vast majority of content on the web is marked up using some flavor of “Hypertext Markup Language” or HTML. Understanding what HTML is designed to do—and not to do—will help you write better markup. In this chapter, we’ll look at the technical aspects of HTML along with its underlying concepts.

A quick note about terminology: throughout this book, I use the term HTML to apply to both HTML and XHTML unless I’m specifically referring ...

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