XHTML Terms
Absolute URL
A URL that specifies the
entire path to a resource, including the scheme, server name, path, and the
file name itself. For example http://www.google.com is
an absolute URL.
Anchor
Jump points within an XHTML
page that can be used as destinations for links.
Attribute
Part of an element
that defines a property of that element. For example, in the markup <a
href="index.html">Home</a>, href is an attribute of the a
element.
Block-level
Markup elements
that display their content on a new line; used mainly for structural parts of a
Web page, such as headings. For example, p, ul, and h1 are block-level
elements.
Body
Section of XHTML markup
that contains the content of the Web page.
Cascade
Method used in cascading
style sheets that takes into account inheritance, specificity,
and locality when more than one rule can be applied to format
page elements.
Cascading Style Sheet
(CSS)
Style sheet language used to
describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Cascading
style sheets are made up of one or more rules.
Cell Padding
Number of pixels between the table
cell's content and the table cell's border.
Cell Spacing
Number of pixels between the
borders of each table cell.
Child
Element that is nested
within other elements. For example, in the markup <h1><i>Introduction</i></h1>, i is the child element.
Client-side Image Map
Image map defined
within the XHTML markup and that is interpreted by the browser
(i.e., the client).
Declaration
Component of a cascading
style sheet rule that specifies the formatting to be applied. For
example, in the rule
p {
color: red; }, color: red is the declaration.
Definition List
Special type of list used for
glossaries or other word-phrase pairs.
Destination
The part of a link that
specifies the type of resource. Destinations can include images, sound files,
movies, or other Web pages.
Division (div element)
Breaks text into blocks that
can be formatted using cascading style sheets.
Element
Markup component that
specifies document structure; can contain text, other elements, or nothing at
all. For example, p, table, i, and form are elements for
paragraphs, tables, italicized text, and input forms respectively.
Frameset
Version of XHTML that
allows frames; this version will be phased out eventually.
Head
Section of XHTML markup
that defines the title of the page and other information that isn't usually
visible to the viewer of the page, but is useful to search engines.
Image Map
An image divided into
clickable regions; the two types of image maps are client-side image maps
and server-side image maps.
Inheritance
Situation pertaining to cascading
style sheets in which a child element takes on the properties
of its parent element with respect to formatting.
Inline
Markup elements
that display their content on the current line; used mainly for text. For
example, b, sup, and span are inline elements.
Label
The part of a link
that the user sees and clicks on to reach the destination.
Link
References to resources on a
file system. Links have three components: destination, label, and
target.
Location
Situation pertaining to cascading
style sheets in which ties between inheritance and specificity
are resolved. For example, locally-defined rules specified within the element
itself via the style attribute have higher precedence.
Markup
Information about the
document content that is included in the document itself. Markup can include
formatting instructions or details about relationships between parts of the
document. Because the markup is text, the document is universally readable. XHTML
has three main types of markup: elements, attributes, and values.
Ordered List
A collection of items that
are numbered.
Parent
An element that
contains other elements. For example, in the markup <h1><i>Introduction</i></h1>, h1 is the parent element.
Properly nested
Characteristic of elements
where children elements are terminated before parent elements. For
example, the markup <h1><i>Introduction</i></h1> is properly nested because the child element (i) is terminated before the parent element (h1). However, the markup <b><a
href="index.html">Home</b></a> is improperly nested because the b element was terminated before the a element.
Relative URL
A URL that specifies a path
to a resource that is relative to the current directory on the file system. For
example, in the markup <a href="../index.html">Home</a>, the destination is the file index.html in the parent directory.
Rule
Primary component of a cascading
style sheet; a rule is comprised of a selector and one or more declarations.
For example, the rule p
{ color: red; } specifies that text
within p elements should be colored red.
Selector
Component of a cascading
style sheet rule that identifies a markup keyword whose
appearance should be affected by the declarations that follow the selector(s).
For example, in the rule p
{ color: red; }, p is the selector.
Server-side Image Map
Image map where the mapping of regions to URLs is specified in a file on the server (i.e., not part of the XHTML page as with client-side image maps).
Span (span element)
Used to identify smaller
blocks of text than headers or divisions, and is primarily used to
format inline text with cascading style sheets.
Specificity
Situation pertaining to cascading
style sheets in which higher priority is given to more specific selectors.
Strict XHTML
Version of XHTML where
only XHTML elements are allowed; useful for taking advantage of
connecting to databases and working with cascading style sheets.
Target
Part of a link, which
is often omitted or implicit, that specifies where the destination will
be displayed. For example, the target can be a named window or a new window.
When omitted, the destination content is typically displayed in the
current browser window, thus overwriting the previous content.
Tooltip
A small string of explanatory
text that appears when the mouse cursor is positioned over a particular XHTML
element for a few seconds.
Transitional XHTML
Version of XHTML where
some elements that will be deprecated are still allowed; useful when the
markup includes deprecated elements.
Unicode
Industry standard for
encoding characters that allows computers to consistently represent and
manipulate text expressed in any of the world's writing systems.
Unordered List
A collection of items where
the order of appearance is not important (e.g., a bulleted list).
UTF-8
8-bit Unicode
transformation format; most accepted character encoding for XHTML markup.
Value
Specific content assigned to
an attribute. For example, in the markup <a
href="index.html">Home</a>, index.html is the value for the href
attribute.
XHTML
Extensible Hypertext Markup
Language; a markup language that has the same depth of expression as
HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax by requiring that all markup elements be properly
nested and terminated.