in this book) is HTML 5.2.Appendix D, From HTML+ to HTML5, tells the his-tory of HTML and lists what makes HTML5 unique.HTML is not a programming language; it is amarkup language, which meansit is a system for identifying and describing the various components of adocument such as headings, paragraphs, and lists. The markup indicates thedocument’s underlyingstructure(you can think of it as a detailed, machine-readable outline). You don’t need programming skills—only patience andcommon sense—to write HTML.The best way to learn HTML is to write out some pages by hand, as we willbe doing in the exercises inPart IIof this book.Styling (CSS)While HTML is used to describe the content in a web page, Cascading StyleSheets (CSS) describe how that content shouldlook(seeNote). The way thepage looks is referred to as itspresentation. Fonts, colors, background images,line spacing, page layout, and so on, are all controlled with CSS. You can evenadd special effects and basic animation to your page.The CSS specification also provides methods for controlling how documentswill be presented in contexts other than a browser, such as in print or readaloud by a screen reader; however, we won’t be covering them much here.
