Andy Harris - HTML5 and CSS3 All-in-One For Dummies

Andy Harris began his teaching life as a special education teacher. As he was teaching young adults with severe disabilities, he taught himself enough computer programming to support his teaching habit with freelance programming. Those were the exciting days when computers started to have hard drives, and some computers began communicating with each other over an arcane mechanism some were calling the Internet.

All this time Andy was teaching computer science part time. He joined the faculty of the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Computer Science department in 1995. He serves as a Senior Lecturer, teaching the introductory course to freshmen as well as numerous courses on web development, general programming, and game programming. As manager of the Streaming Media Laboratory, he developed a number of online video-based courses, and worked on a number of international distance education projects including helping to start a computer science program in Tetevo, Macedonia FYR, and collaboration with Sun-Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China.

Andy is active in home schooling, and is the technology columnist for a national homeschool magazine.

Andy is the author of several other computing books including HTML5 Game Development For Dummies, JavaScript/AJAX for Dummies, and Game Programming: The L Line. He invites your comments and questions at .

I dedicate this book to Jesus Christ, my personal savior, and to Heather, the joy in my life. I also dedicate this project to Elizabeth, Matthew, Jacob, and Benjamin. I love each of you.

Thank you first to Heather. Even though I type all the words, this book is a real partnership, like the rest of our life. Thanks for being my best friend and companion. Thanks also for doing all the work it takes for us to sustain a family when Im in writing mode.

Thank you to Connie Santisteban. Ive really enjoyed working with you on this project.

Thank you to the copy and development editor, Linda Morris. I appreciate your efforts to make my geeky mush turn into something readable. Thanks for improving my writing.

A special thanks to Claudia Snell for technical editing. I appreciate your vigilance. You have helped to make this book as technically accurate as possible.

Thank you to the many people at Wiley who contribute to a project like this. The author only gets to meet a few people, but so many more are involved in the process. Thank you very much for all youve done to help make this project a reality.

A big thank you to the open-source community which has created so many incredible tools and made them available to all. Id especially like to thank the creators of Firefox, Firebug, Aptana, HTML Validator, Komodo Edit, Notepad++, PHP, Apache, jQuery, and the various jQuery plug-ins. This is an amazing and generous community effort.

Thanks to those Ive gotten to learn and teach with, from the graduate students, to the math homework girls: Graciela and Vanesa.

Id finally like to thank the IUPUI computer science family for years of support on various projects. Thank you especially to all my students, current and past. Ive learned far more from you than the small amount Ive taught. Thank you for letting me be a part of your education.

Publishers Acknowledgments

Acquisitions Editor: Constance Santisteban

Project Editor: Linda Morris

Copy Editor: Linda Morris

Technical Editor: Claudia Snell

Editorial Assistant: Annie Sullivan

Sr. Editorial Assistant: Cherie Case

Project Coordinator: Sheree Montgomery

Cover Image: iStockphoto.com/Marina Strizhak

Chapter 1

In This Chapter

Creating a basic web page

Understanding the most critical HTML tags

Setting up your system to work with HTML