HTML and CSS

HTML

I’m back to my Interact with Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design reading, and it’s getting a bit more complicated. Chapter 10 introduces HTML. Thus, HTML “consists of content – the words, references that pull in images to be displayed, and other data found on a web page – wrapped in special syntax markers that indicate what the difference pieces of context are (paragraphs, lists, images, etc).” There are some important types of HTML available:

   
1. Emphasizing pieces of text: some elements are for emphasizing pieces of text within the paragraphs, such as quotes, cited quote sources, strong/important text, code excerpts, deleted or inserted text, etc.
   
2. Numbered lists: HTML elements make this list possible and is one of the more important types to know as it is frequently used.
   
3. Forms: this element allows website visitors to enter information into the page.
   
4. Images: this element I particularly like as it means that that images can be inserted into a web page. I love looking at pictures of places and people and things.
   
5. Linking documents: these are elements that allow the linking of one document to another, even other people’s.

CSS

Chapter 11 is introducing CSS. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS2 became a recommendation in 1998; CSS 2.1 was agreed upon in 2001. Yet, CSS3 was started in 1998 and is still being worked upon. Some important concepts of the chapter are as follows:

   
1. Inheritance: is the mechanism by which certain properties are passed from a parent element on to its children. If it didn’t exist, you’d have to specify every property for every HTML element, every time you wrote a web page.
   
2. The cascade: it’s the mechanism that controls the end result when multiple conflicting and overlapping CSS declarations apply to the same element. It has three main concepts: importance, specificity, and source order.
   
3. Importance: the importance of a CSS declaration depends on where it is specified. The later orders override earlier ones.
   
4. Specificity: it’s a measure of how specific a rule’s selector is. A selector with a low specificity may match many elements, while a selector with a high specificity might only match a single element on the page.
   
5. Source order: if two declarations affect the same element and have the same importance and the same specificity, this is the final distinguishing mark. The declarations that appears later in the style sheet will win.