Indiana University: IT Training Tips Blog

Way back in July, the W3C (the governing organization of web standards) announced that it was not going to renew the charter of the XHTML2 working group. In non-bureaucracy speak, that means the W3C has stuffed XHTML2 standards development into a bottle and chucked it out to sea, where it will spend the rest of eternity bobbing on the waves and following the thermal currents. The W3C did this so that it could focus all of its attention on developing HTML5.

"Wait a minute, " one might shout on hearing this news, "I thought XHTML was the wave of the future, and HTML was what Cro-Magnons used to code their web pages??? What's going on?"

Its easy to be confused, and, yes, even a little bit alarmed by this news. But, in essence, the labels here don't really represent what you think they do: XHTML2 isn't really XHTML as you know it, and HTML5 encompasses a lot more than HTML4.01. Here's what you need to know about both of these standards: (more...)

Web authors have a wide variety of HTML or XHTML tags to work with when creating Web pages. In addition to common tags like <p>, <ul> or <strong>, there are lesser-known, but still useful ones such as those below:

There are dozens of similarly useful and perfectly valid elements available for use. Some of them, such as <code>, have a default style in most browsers (<code> will render in a monospaced font). Others such as <acronym> have no default style. However, you can use the tags as hooks to add your own style by redefining the look of the element using CSS.

(more...)