Welcome to another article on Building Better Web Pages. This article series comprehensively covers building an HTML document: easily learned, but rarely perfected.

Today’s article covers Doctype declarations. While there is a wealth of information on the internet already about Doctypes, I have always clicked away without really understanding what was really going on. Besides, we can’t completely cover “Building Better Web Pages” without it. The most basic questions are “Why do I need a Doctype?” or “Which Doctype should I use?” You might figure this would be easy to explain. I think can be, but I just never see it solidly stated.

Welcome to the first article in the series, Building Better Web Pages. This article series comprehensively covers building an HTML document: easily learned, but rarely perfected.

Today’s article covers Semantic HTML. The goal of this article is to show you how every HTML document should be planned. I say ‘planned’ because ‘started’ or ‘began’ suggests the top of a page, and that is not what this is about. Semantics refer to the meaning of something. In the case of html, its the meaning of the contents only. Presentation, through style or CSS file, is merely for human benefit. Therefore, when we talk about ‘planning’ an HTML document, we are talking only about a hierarchy of information.