Starting with the essentials

You might wonder what’s meant by this chapter’s title: web page essentials. This chapter
will run through everything you need to do with a web page prior to working on the layout
and content, including creating the initial documents, attaching external documents to
HTML files, and dealing with the head section of the web page. Little of this is a thrill with
regard to visual design, which is why many designers ignore the topics we’ll cover, or stick
their fingers in their ears, hum loudly, and wish it would all go away (and then probably get
rather odd looks from nearby colleagues). However, as the chapter’s title states, everything
we’ll be talking about is essential for any quality web page, even if you don’t see exciting
things happening visually.
This chapter also explores web page backgrounds, which, although they should be used
sparingly and with caution, often come in handy. It’s worth bearing in mind that some
aspects discussed here will crop up later in the book. For example, CSS techniques used to
attach backgrounds to a web page can be used to attach a background to any web page
element (be that a div, table, heading, or paragraph). But before we get into any CSS
shenanigans, we’ll put our CSS cheerleading team on hold and look at how to properly
construct an XHTML document.