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.
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.
Multimedia
What about images and ...
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