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This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition
Copyright © 2006 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Preface
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xvii
the <p> tag. The paragraph element consists of the accepted element-type name
within the starting tag (
<p>), intervening content, and the ending paragraph tag (</p>).
The
<p> tag is the starting tag for the paragraph element, and its contents, known as
attributes, ultimately affect the paragraph element type’s contents.
Although these are important distinctions, we’re pragmatists. It is the markup tag
that authors apply in their documents and that affects any intervening content.
Accordingly, throughout the book, we relax the distinction between element types
and tags, often talking about tags and all related contents and not necessarily using
the term element-type when it would be technically appropriate to make the distinc-
tion. Forgive us the transgression, but we do so for the sake of clarity.
HTML Versus XHTML
It’s not Latin, but HTML has reached old age in standard version 4.01. The W3C
has no plans to develop another version and has officially said so. Rather, HTML is
being subsumed and modularized as an Extensible Markup Language (XML). Its
new name is XHTML, Extensible Hyptertext Markup Language.
The emergence of XHTML is just another chapter in the often tumultuous history of
HTML and the Web, where confusion for authors is the norm, not the exception. At
its nadir, the elders of the W3C responsible for accepted and acceptable uses of the
language—standards—lost control of the language in the browser “wars” between
Netscape and Microsoft. The abortive HTML+ standard never got off the ground,
and HTML 3.0 became so bogged down in debate that the W3C simply shelved the
entire draft. HTML 3.0 never happened, despite what some opportunistic marketers
claimed in their literature. Instead, by late 1996, the browser manufacturers con-
vinced the W3C to release HTML standard version 3.2, which for all intents and
purposes simply standardized most of Netscape’s HTML extensions.
Netscape’s dominance as the leading browser, and as a leader in web technologies,
faded dramatically toward the end of the millennium. By then, Microsoft had effec-
tively bundled Internet Explorer into the Windows operating system, not only as an
installed application, but also as a dominant feature of the GUI desktop. In addition,
Internet Explorer introduced several features (albeit nonstandard at the time) that
appealed principally to the growing Internet business and marketing community.
Fortunately for those of us who appreciate and strongly support standards, the W3C
took back its primacy role with HTML 4.0, which stands today as HTML version 4.01,
released in December 1999. Absorbing many of the Netscape and Internet Explorer
innovations, the standard is clearer and cleaner than any previous ones, establishes
solid implementation models for consistency across browsers and platforms, pro-
vides strong support and incentives for the companion Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
standard for HTML-based displays, and makes provisions for alternative (nonvisual)
user agents, as well as for more universal language supports.