by Wes Joyner

Created on: December 23, 2008   Last Updated: September 27, 2010

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a core Internet technology at the heart of every web page you visit. This simple language communicates the framework of a web page to your browser for proper rendering. HTML is incredibly easy to learn, but incomplete understanding of its function and syntax often leads to poorly designed pages.

HTML is defined by standards established by the

World Wide Web Consortium. Your web page should begin with a Document Type Definition (DTD) that identifies which standards, or set of rules, your HTML will follow. When selecting a standard, consider how closely different browsers adhere to it; you will find that Microsoft Internet Explorer is infamous for non-compliance, despite being the most popular web browser in the world. Transitional standards may be the best choice for flexibility and cross-browser compatibility, while strict standards provide the most uniformity for ease of integration with other web design technologies.

The most common abuse of HTML is employing it to define style, which is a throwback to practices used prior to the rise of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Hypertext Markup Language is specifically intended to define the structure of objects within a web page. Imagine your website as a large box with several smaller boxes inside; each of those boxes has smaller boxes inside, and so on until the smallest boxes have coins inside. The purpose of HTML is to explain to your browser how these boxes are arranged in relation to each other, but it should not be used to define the properties of the boxes. Each individual box or class of boxes may have distinct dimensions, colors, or composition that could be defined by HTML attributes, but this is more appropriately left to CSS.

Furthermore, HTML should not be used to define functionality or content. Continuing the previous example, functionality describes how a box behaves when a user interacts with it, such as opening it, or even picking it up and throwing it; these actions are best handled by languages such as JavaScript or VBScript. The coins in the boxes are the content; on a web page, this would be the text, images, or media being presented. Content can be statically embedded directly into your HTML by hand, or it can be dynamically incorporated using databases and server technologies such as ASP.NET. Separating these aspects of web design, leaving HTML strictly dictating structure, will allow you to build pages with much greater scalability and ease of maintenance.

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