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.