rdfs:comment
| - The HyperText Markup Language is, surprise!, a markup language. That means it's for marking up text; that is, telling computer programs what type of information text represents. It's not, fundamentally at least, for telling them how text should be displayed to humans nor for building interactive human interfaces. (Cascading Style Sheets, on the other hand, are concerned with how information is arranged and presented in the various media.)
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abstract
| - The HyperText Markup Language is, surprise!, a markup language. That means it's for marking up text; that is, telling computer programs what type of information text represents. It's not, fundamentally at least, for telling them how text should be displayed to humans nor for building interactive human interfaces. (Cascading Style Sheets, on the other hand, are concerned with how information is arranged and presented in the various media.) It does offer form controls and links, but these can theoretically be used by programs other than visual browsers - if page authors use the markup appropriately. It does provide elements which effect formatting in visual browsers, but only because formatting is how visual browsers can meaningfully render the markup. It's about meaning, not appearance. Appearance is simply the mainstream representation of meaning; HTML allows the representation to be determined by the medium (such as your car's audio system). This chapter tries to give you the tools to build interoperable, or medium-neutral, pages, and to keep them easy to maintain. Note that you don't need all of these things to start designing Web pages, but to do it right you will need them. So it's okay if you decide to be lazy about this stuff for now, in the interest of not getting overwhelmed. But come back to it regularly to see what other stuff you can do.
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