Extras

Section 1 - Introduction
Section 2 - Basics
Section 3 - Next Level
Section 4 - Advanced
Section 5 - Publishing
Section 6 - Extras
      Animated gifs
      JavaScript
      Java
      DHTML
      Flash
      CGI files
      Miscellaneous
Appendices

Once you learn about HTML, you can make your web pages do new and exciting things with some added extras. This section isn't meant to be comprehensive, but to give the user an idea of what else is out there. In this section, we'll discuss some of the useful add-ons or tools that can be used on a website. You may encounter the following:

Animated gifs
JavaScript
Java
DHTML
Flash
CGI files
Miscellaneous scripts and whatnot

One more thing I'd like to mention here. If this bores you, skip it.

So far we've discussed HTML. It is the basic language of the internet, but there are other versions ow web programming making their rounds. One of the most commonly mentioned is XHTML. XHTML stands for EXtensible HyperText Markup Language. It is considered a very strict version of HTML, and it's almost identical to HTML version 4.01, the HTML currently used.

As noted by sites like Who is Hosting This and W3schools.com, the most important differences between HTML and XHTML are:

XHTML elements must be properly nested
Tag names must be in lowercase
All XHTML elements must be closed
Here's an image <img src="happy.gif" alt="Happy face" />
Attribute names must be in lower case
Attribute values must be quoted
Attribute minimization is forbidden
The id attribute replaces the name attribute
XHTML documents must have a DOCTYPE declaration

It's not a hard transition from HTML to XHTML if you learned HTML correctly.

Another term you may run across is XML. XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language. It is only made to describe data. It will not format that data for you, but is used with HTML to send info from place to place. It is not a replacement for HTML at all. It is very similar to HTML however.

XML uses tags, but these tags aren't defined by the computer. They are defined by the creator of the page. Because of this, XML doesn't "do" anything, but it makes info compatible between different systems.