In the early days of HTML, tags were used to define how the information was to be displayed on the browser. With XHTML1 and especially with HTML5, formatting was to be handled with the CSS and the HTML tags were to be used to add meaning to the text. The meaning of structure is call semantic meaning.
There are two main groups of tags used in the body of a document: flow and phrasing. Flow statements are used to section the page into meaningful chunks, where phrasing elements add meaning to individual words or groups of words.
Learning Outcomes for this Chapter
Upon completion of the reading of this chapter and assignments found at the end, a student should be able to:
- explain the difference between flow and phrasing elements,
- understand that HTML tags are to be used to add semantic meaning to the content of a page, not format,
- implement nested flow elements to format an article or collection of articles,
- use phrasing elements to mark text, within flow, to add additional meaning,
- recall that flow elements should not be inside phrasing elements,
- create properly nested, semantically meaningful, Web pages.