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

The purpose of this series is to help designers build better web pages. I have been an artist since childhood, so perhaps that is why I see writing HTML as an art form. However, today’s development tools and content management systems make knowing whats under the hood all but obsolete. Understanding the foundations of HTML is what separates the wheat from the chaff, as far as designers go. See the Table of Contents.

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.