It also ensures that the book will be relevant to you, regardless of what software you
use or your current skill level. Therefore, I suggest you install a quality text editor to work
through the exercises, or set your web design application to use its code view. Once you??™re
familiar with the concepts outlined in this book, you can apply them to your work, whatever
your chosen application for web design. This level of flexibility is important, because
you never know when you might have to switch applications??”something that??™s relatively
painless if you know how to design for the Web and understand technologies like CSS
and HTML.
Introducing HTML and XHTML
The foundation of the majority of web pages is HyperText Markup Language, commonly
known by its initials, HTML. A curious facet of the language is that it??™s easy to pick up the
basics??”anyone who??™s computer literate should be able to piece together a basic page
after learning some tags??”but it has enough flexibility and scope to keep designers interested
and experimenting, especially when HTML is combined with Cascading Style Sheets
(CSS), which we??™ll discuss later in this chapter. This section presents an overview of HTML
tags and elements, and how HTML and XHTML relate to web standards.
If you??™re relatively new to web design, you may be wondering about the best platform
and software for creating websites. Ultimately, it matters little which platform you
choose, as long as you have access to the most popular browsers for testing purposes
(a list that I??™d now include Apple??™s Safari in, alongside Internet Explorer, Firefox, and
Opera).
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