HTML Template

The following bit of code is a mickey mouse XHTML file. You can copy this and paste it into a text file of your own, and use it to create a new web page.

Fire up your favourite text editor, copy the following text into it, save it with the extension .html or .htm, and view it in your favourite browser.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
  "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>My New Web Page</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" 
          content="text/html; 
	  charset=utf-8"/>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>My New Web Page</h1>
    <p>
      The first paragraph in my document.
    </p>
    <h2>An Unordered List</h2>
    <ul>
      <li>Item one</li>
      <li>Item two</li>
    </ul>
    <h2>A Hyperlink</h2>
    <p>
      <a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>
    </p>
    <hr/>
    <p>
      By [your name here] 2010Jul03
    </p>
  </body>
</html>

Mess with this. Try changing the "ul" tag above to an "ol" tag.

As of 2007Oct31, I have updated the file to include the language stuff that the W3C validator wants attached to the html tag. It did not use to require this.

XHTML 1.0

If you do not break anything, the prototype above will validate as XHTML 1.0. HTML is based on an SGML Document Type Definition (DTD). XHTML is based on an XML DTD. The most noticeable differences between XHTML and traditional HTML are...

Tags are now case sensitive.: All the traditional HTML tags must be entered in lower case.
All tags must be properly closed.: In traditional HTML, tags like <p> and <li> only have to be opened. The next occurence of the tag indicates that the previous one is closed. In XHTML, the closing </p> and </li> are required.
Single tags must be closed: Single tags like <br>, <hr> and <meta> must be terminated with a slash, as shown in the example above. These are entered as <br/>, <hr/> and <meta/>.