The web world is heading rapidly toward XML. The interim step between it and HTML is XHTML. This is to give old HTML coders a more forgiving language to work in while we get used to a few new conventions that will be absolute essentials for XML. Some of these same new conventions apply to creating CSS compatible code as well. If you're just learning HTML, you might want to learn some of these new formatting conventions from the outset.

For example, HTML doesn't care whether your tags are uppercase, lowercase, or a combination. However, XHTML won't recognize <FONT> and <font> as the same thing. So you can't use <FONT> to open and </font> to close. (It will take either case, but you must open and close your tags in the same one.) The clincher is that XML when we get there isn't going to recognize UPPER at all. So I suggest you just get used to creating ALL your tags in <lowercase>

Another new convention is the required use of closing tags. If you're just learning HTML, I strongly suggest you learn to close everything — XML insists upon it. If you're using a code that doesn't have a closing tag, you should add a space and a / before the closing bracket. For example: <br /> — if you study the source code of AW pages much, you've probably seen lots of this in Jot's code. <img src="file" /> is another.

Now, somewhere in all of this it was decided that the <p> tag should be given up in favor of <br /> <br />. So, if you want to be CSS compliant, use two breaks instead of a paragraph code.

Oh, I almost forgot, all values need to be enclosed in quotation marks. <font size="3"> NOT <font size=3> Hey, don't look at me. I didn't make the new rules. I'm working like mad trying to break myself of these long-standing habits, but let me tell you it isn't easy. *lol* So, my third and final suggestion is: even if you're not ready to learn XML, you might want to check out some of its formatting rules, so you can learn it "right" the first time. *g*