- Welcome to Duty
- XHTML: A Web Design Perspective
- The Power of <div>
- Working with Class
- XML and DTDs
- Ready to Roll
- Summary
- Additional Reading
XHTML: A Web Design Perspective
A quick chat with Wilma reveals good news. Wilma is using XHTML, the version of HTML that conforms to the rules of XML. She’s also using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to specify how the data appears when it hits a web page. By using CSS to control display, Wilma is following an important principle of design: Keep content separate from display. So the company is on the right track. With CSS and XHTML in place, we’re well on our way to bringing dynamic content to the ZwiftBooks web site.
However, although Wilma and her team are using XHTML and CSS for web page development, we need to make sure that they’re using it to full advantage. Much like in the SVG example discussed in part 1 of this series, the key to flexible design is structural tags. In SVG, the <g> tag gave us the ability to apply styling information that propagated down to the children of <g>. XHTML has a similar structuring element called div; when used correctly, div can greatly facilitate the structure and styling of web pages.