ch03/readme.txt Study Order for Files in This Directory These are the files from Chapter 3. --------------------------------------- 1. first.html (does not validate as HTML 5) A first and very simple HTML example. Introduces the four main elements of any HTML page (html, head, title and body), as well as the h1 (header) and p (paragraph) elements. 2. second.html (does not validate as HTML 5) Introduces the HTML comment, the br (line break) tag, and the unordered list (ul and li tags). Also shows one (fairly typical) way of formatting HTML markup. Note that empty elements no longer need to be "self-closing" (like they had to be in XHTML) with the forward slash (and its optional preceding blank space) preceding the closing angle bracket. Thus the
of XHTML becomes
in HTML 5. Leaving an empty element in its self-closing form is still OK, and some authors even recommend retaining the practice, for backward compatibility with XHTML. 3. third.html (validates as HTML 5) Introduces the following three items: - - - These are three major changes that are much simplified when compared to their previous XHTML counterparts. The DOCTYPE declaration is the most radical departure. You can now even memorize it, it's so simple. It is even optional, but it should be there to prevent older browsers from switching into "quirks mode". The html opening tag has a lang attribute. It too is optional, but is recommended since globalization makes it increasingly important to ensure that browsers know what language they are dealing with. The meta tag now needs only a charset attribute, and the meta element is also no longer self-closing, just like the br element in second.html (above). 4. The nature1 subdirectory (read nature1_readme.txt) 5. The nature2 subdirectory (read nature2_readme.txt) 6. The nature3 subdirectory (read nature3_readme.txt) For each of the above subdirectories, be sure to read the corresponding readme file before examining its contents. All pages in each of these directories should validate as HTML 5.