It never fails. You're sitting at your desk watching the clock, counting down the last ten minutes to five. Already in your mind you are on the road home, thinking about dinner, the kids or that new TV reality show that's coming on tonight. You're zoning when a shadow falls over your desk. You look up with a sinking feeling to see the joykiller of all time...the boss.

"You took a computer course in college, didn't you?" he asks. You know these open ended questions never end well, but you nod in agreement, dreams of chicken cacciatore and a quiet night of TV vanishing in a puff of added responsibility. "Good!" he says, smiling. "You can update our website for us. The usual guy is out and the web shop can't get to it until Monday."

Like a demented holiday gnome, he bestows you with a stack of requirements that looks like your teenager's last book report and merrily goes away, getting ready for his own quiet night of TV. You groan as you look through the five sheets of requirements stapled together looking like a shopping list written for geeks.

You figure out how to open the site and look at the pages in your text editor. In horror you realize that you're either going to have to hire a codemonkey on the side from your kids' school or figure this out on your own.

Fear not. With a basic understanding of HTML, that funny techie language that has entered the work world like a rampaging flu, you can be home in time to find out that the reality show you were so keen to see is just a rerun. Take a deep breath, click your heels three times and dive into a new world

When you first open a webpage up in your editor, you will undoubtedly see something like this:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? >
< !DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DT D/xhtml1-strict.dtd >
< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/ xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" >
< head >
< title >HTML For Post Teens</ title >
< script type="text/javascript" src="scripts/foo.js" ></ script >
< meta name="description" content="Letting the working class get home by five" ></ meta >
< meta name="keywords" content="HTML,coding,markup,no n-expert,layman,boss is an idiot" ></ meta >
< meta name="robots" content="noarchive" ></ meta >
</ head >
< body id="bg_body" >
< div id="page" >
< br />
< div id="insidepage" >
< div id="flashhome" >
< div id="flashcontent"

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