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HTML Today

HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the main markup language for Web Pages on the Internet.  By markup language I mean tags (code) that are used to surround content so that the content can be manipulated by those tags, depending on which tags you use and how you define them.  HTML has been around since the early 1990’s.  Tim Berners-Lee is widely considered to be one of those most responsible for the widespread use of HTML and the birth of the World Wide Web.

HTML has gone through many version upgrades over the years:

Version	Year – Month
HTML 2.0	1994 – Nov.
HTML 3.2	1997 – Jan.
HTML 4.0	1997 – Dec.
HTML 4.01	1999 – Dec.
XHTML 1.0	2000 – Jan.
XHTML 1.1	2001 – May
(X)HTML 5	2012 – 2022

So when a new version comes out do you have to upgrade your website(s) to the new standard?  No.  Web browsers are the applications that “read” the HTML code and render the code into the visual web page that you see on your screen.  When your web browser gets updated to a new version it will be able to read and conform to the new standards of HTML, but most of the time the browsers grandfather in the old standards.  So the new HTML code will work but the old HTML code will probably still work as well.  The idea is that eventually the web browsers will not provide any support for the old standards, but they are phasing them out over a long period of time.

If you were to build a HTML web page from scratch today I would suggest that you code it in xhtml 1.0 strict.  How would that look?

Which would produce the web page that looks like this:

Notice from the code the first line <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>.  That DOCTYPE belongs as the very first code in any webpage you build.  It is not part of your website but it tells a validator exactly what to expect when reading your code.  Then should come the root element “html” which would have an “xmlns” attribute <html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>.

From there comes the familiar HEAD tag where you would put your META and TITLE tags.  You would also put any SCRIPT or STYLE tags in there.  Then comes your BODY and inside goes all your code to build your web page.  Then at the very end you need to close BODY and close HTML.  And you have a valid xhtml 1.0 strict webpage.  Of course only if you have the proper code inside the BODY tags.

One of the changes in xhtml from html is deprecated code.  The CENTER tag is not to be used in xhtml. If you want to center a table in xhtml you need to use a “style” and make the table’s MARGIN-RIGHT set to AUTO and its MARGIN-LEFT set to AUTO.  Or if you want to center text you would need to use the style TEXT-ALIGN set to CENTER.  And there are many other examples of deprecated code from earlier versions of HTML.  However even if you code improperly it is very likely that modern browsers will try to fix your mistakes when it renders the code.  This fact has led to lots of messy web page coding.  As it turns out that might have been the best thing for the Internet because it encourages creativity and production which in turn has led to the unbelievable growth of the Internet.  And I would argue that the explosion of the Internet into our world has been an extremely positive and productive force.