The Flesh on an HTML or XHTML Document
Except for the
<html>
, <head>
,
<body>
, and <title>
tags, the HTML and XHTML standards have few other required structural
elements. You’re free to include pretty much
anything else in the contents of your document. (The web surfers
among you know that authors have taken full advantage of that
freedom, too.) Perhaps surprisingly, though, there are only three
main types of HTML/XHTML content: tags (which we described
previously), comments, and text.
Comments
A raw document with all its embedded tags can quickly become nearly unreadable, like computer-programming source code. We strongly recommend that you use comments to guide your composing eye.
Although it’s part of your document, nothing in a
comment, which goes between the special starting tag
<!--
and ending tag -->
comment delimiters, gets included in the browser display of your
document. You see a comment in the source, as in our simple HTML
example, but you don’t see it on the display, as
evidenced by our comment’s absence in Figure 2-1. Anyone can download the source text of your
documents and read the comments, though, so be careful what you
write. [Section 3.5.3]
Text
If it isn’t a tag or a comment, it’s text. The bulk of content in most of your HTML/XHTML documents — the part readers see on their browser displays — is text. Special tags give the text structure, such as headings, lists, and tables. Others advise the browser how the content should be formatted and displayed.
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