HTML, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript 101

Underneath the hood of any web page—whether it’s your uncle’s “Check out this summer’s fishin’” page or the front door of a billion-dollar online retailer—is nothing more than line after line of ordinary typed text. You embed simple commands, called tags, within this text. Web browsers know how to interpret these commands to properly display pages. When you create a page with these commands in them, the document becomes known as an HTML page (for Hypertext Markup Language), and HTML is still at the heart of most of the Web.

The HTML code that creates a web page can be as simple as this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.
w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Hey, I am the title of this Web page.</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hey, I am some body text on this Web page.</p>
</body>
</html>

While it may not be exciting, this short bit of HTML code is all you need to make an actual web page.

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