Website Creation (Total Package)

A Web of Structured Documents
To start off, you need to consider the concept of the Web as a sea of documents. In its relatively short life,
the Web has grown to feature millions of sites and billions of pages. For the moment, think of each of
these pages as a document. Many documents on the Web bear a strong similarity to the documents you
meet in everyday life, and all documents have a structure, so think for a moment about the structure of
some of the documents you see in everyday life.
Every morning I used to read a newspaper. A newspaper is made up of several stories or articles (and
probably a fair smattering of advertisements, too). Each story has a headline and then some paragraphs,
perhaps a subheading and then some more paragraphs; it may also include a picture or two.
I don’t buy a daily paper anymore as I tend to look at news online, but the structure of articles on news
Web sites is very similar to the structure of articles in newspapers. Each article is made up of headings,
paragraphs of text, the odd picture (and, yes, maybe some ads, too). The parallel is quite clear. The only
real difference is that each story gets its own page on a Web site, which is usually accessible from a
headline and a brief summary either on the home page or the title pages for one of the subsections (such
as the politics, sports, or entertainment sections).
Consider another example: Say I’m catching a train to see a friend, so I check the schedule to see what
time the trains go that way. The main part of the schedule is a table telling me what times trains arrive at
and when they depart from different stations. Like paragraphs and headings, a lot of documents use
tables. From the stocks and shares pages in the financial supplement of my paper to the TV listings at the
back, you come across tables of information every day—and these are often recreated on the Web.
A different kind of document you often come across is a form. For example, I have a form sitting on my
desk (which I really must mail) from an insurance company. This form contains fields for me to write my
name, address, and the amount of coverage I want, and boxes I have to check off to indicate the number
of rooms in the house and what type of lock I have on my front door. Indeed, there are lots of forms on
the Web, from a simple search box that asks what you are looking for to the registration forms you are
required go through before you can place an online order for books or CDs.
As you can see, there are many parallels between the structure of printed documents you come across
every day and pages you see on the Web. So you will hardly be surprised to learn that when it comes to
writingWeb pages, your code tells the Web browser the structure of the information you want to
display—what text to put in a heading, or in a paragraph, or in a table, and so on—so that the browser
can present it properly to the user.
The languages you need to learn in order to tell aWeb browser the structure of a document—how to
make a heading, a paragraph, a table, and so on—are HTML and XHTML.