Web Design

HTML Fundamentals

HTML describes a document's content and structure and not its appearance

Browser read and renders a page from top to bottom, so place elements in the proper order.

Things to be aware of

1. The browser doesn't care about whitespace in the markup file, therefore, we format the markup so that it is human readable.
2. Comments can be added in the document and the browser will not render it.
3. Some tags have been deprecated so don't use them.
4. Follow the latest common practice and be aware when copying and pasting old markup.
5. Check for browser compatibility on the newer stuff.
6. Browsers have built-in styles. CSS is used to style a webpage.
7. Understand if an element is a block element or an inline element.
8. Use grouping elements to group content so its easier to position and style the content on the web page.
9. The most important thing is that browsers will not catch your markup mistakes. It will try to still render the content and it might still look right.

Character Sets and Special Characters

Character Set

A collection of characters and symbols rendered by the browser

Character Encoding

Associates each character from a character set that can be stored and read by a computer program

Character Entity Reference

Used to insert special symbols that are reserved characters in HTML or has no keyboard entry

Examples: Non-breaking space:     Copyright: ©