Glossary
- Class
- A CSS class is used to modify any Selector or any subset of text.
A sample of a class specification is:
.emphasis {font-weight:bold}
Example of HTML using a paragraph selector modified by a class:
<p class="emphasis">Your entire paragraph text. </p>
Example of HTML using a class to modify a small amount of text:
<span class="emphasis"> text to have emphasis </span>
- CSS
- Cascading Style Sheets
CSS contain display markup tags for selectors and classes. The CSS specifications can go inside HTML files, but external .css files are highly recommended.
For another excellent tutorial on CSS see W3Schools
- Deprecated
- Outdated and soon to be Obsolete
If you get an error from the W3C markup validation service that says a tag is deprecated, this means the W3C has declared it to be outdated and warns it may become obsolete soon.
For a list of HTML tags and their status, and good suggestions for alternate tags, see W3C Basic HTML Tags
- Head Section
- The header section of a file with the file extension:
.html
The header section starts with <head> and ends with </head>
CSS styles are sometimes put into this section. If styles are put here they are bracketed by <style> and </style>
Any reference to an external .css file is put into the head section.
A sample of an external .css file reference is:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="nameofstylesheet.css" type="text/css">
- HTML
- Hyper Text Markup Language
An HTML file contains markup tags which web browsers interpret to display content.
The typical file extension on an HTML file is: .html
For an excellent tutorial on HTML see W3Schools
- Markup Tags
- Numbers and/or letters arranged in a code that is interpreted by web
browsers to display web page content.
Sample HTML tag: <h1> meaning heading 1
Sample CSS tag: h1{font-size:x-large}
- Page Source
- The HTML or XHTML behind the page you are seeing in your web browser.
- RGB
- Red, Green, Blue
This is a color model used for computer display.
For an easy introduction to RGB see Wikipedia on RGB Color Spaces
- Selector
- A selector is a tag that is linked to a particular style.
Some examples of selectors: body, h1, h2, p
A sample of a CSS specification for a selector is:
h1{font-size:xx-large; font-style:italic;color:green}
- Style Section
- If a web page uses inline CSS tags they are stored in the style section within the head section of a
.html file.
The style section starts with <style> and ends with </style>
- W3C
- World Wide Web Consortium
- WYSINWOG
- What You See Is Not What Others Get
One web browser will not display the same page the same way as another browser.
- WYSIWYG
- What You See Is What You Get
A lovely idea that many software tools claim to do. Web browsers sometimes display exactly what you saw when you developed a web page, but not always.
- XHTML
- eXtensible HyperText Markup Language
HTML which conforms to XML standards.
XHTML is set to replace HTML and is strongly recommended by the W3C
XHTML is a more stringent version of HTML where every markup tag is opened and closed, and every browser should be able to interpret the tags correctly.
The typical file extension on a XHTML file is: .html
For an excellent tutorial on XHTML see W3Schools
- XML
- eXtensible Markup Language
A World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommended standard for markup tags which describe data.
The data described by XML tags can be content for display in a web browser, or data prepared for entry into a database, or any data that can be interpreted by any XML-compliant software. The standard tags free the data from any software or system-specific format.