"In this tutorial you will learn so-called XHTML (Extensible HyperText
Mark-up Language) which, in short, is a new and more well-structured
way of writing HTML."
"what you have learned in this tutorial is a new and stricter and
cleaner version of HTML called XHTML."
XHTML is newer, cleaner and more structured. What XHTML is not, is a
_replacement_ for HTML. What do we want our finished students to be
producing, when they go off to write pages on their own? The general
opinion locally is that is should be valid HTML 4.01 Strict, and that
it should follow most aspects of XML formation (explicitly paired tags,
quoted attributes) but not the closing of empty tags.
This tutorial is the very lowest entry-level beginners' tutorial
possible (and that's a good thing). Given the choice between confusing
them, fully teaching a complex issue and simply teaching them to ignore
XHTML, then (personally) I teach the existence of XHTML and the total
avoidance of it in practice. The audience for this tutorial just don't
_need_ to know about XHTML. We can also teach the XML-like syntax as
an issue of good practice - point out that older code omitted it, but
make it clear that this is an old and bad practice that shouldn't be
followed.
Students _like_ to know that they're only getting a partial story, so
long as it's presented properly. Tell them that it is complex and
you're teaching them the core they _really_ need to know is
understandable, appreciated and seen as a relief. Telling them there's
more to learn if they _want_ to, is an encouragement for those who want
to take it further. We don't have to (as some tutorials have) take a
deliberately (if beneficiently) misleading line that "HTML 4 is dead"
or that all code must be valid (it clearly isn't, on many major sites).
Students are ignorant, not stupid - they're capable of appreciating the
subtlety, so long as we're honest with them.
If the site becomes an succes we will definitely consider
an advanced HTML tutorial.
I don't think the site's style is appropriate for "advanced", which is
why I said "more HTML". Your market is the mass entry level, not the
geek-larvae (and all the better for it).
My current HTML tutorial recommendation is "Head First" -- a big thick
book that's still just an _introduction_ to advanced HTML, not the
totality of it. Also there's a lot of people who could benefit from
your site, but would be scared off by an "advanced" label.
Incidentally "Head First" pulls off the HTML / XHTML issue better than
any other tutorial I've seen.
"HTML is tags - and nothing but tags. To learn HTML is to learn and use
different tags."
Nothing could be more wrong IMHO.
HTML is *not* about tags, it is about *elements*. An element consists of a
start tag, some [optional] content and usually (HTML) an end tag.
I would disagree with this. XML (and XHTML) is about elements, but HTML
is still very much about tags.
- We commonly talk about tags. They _are_ the lingua franca
description of what we work with, and it's pretentious to change this
unless you're an expert discussing the subtleties with other experts.
- We _are_ working with tags. We're using SGML parsing, and that's
based on tags. SGML doesn't even have elements in the document, it can
only create the notion of an element after we've parsed the document
into the DOM. Although it's invalid to mis-nest the tags as you
describe, it's still perfectly valid HTML to omit the closing </p>. You
can only understand how HTML actually works, at a level that's
important to understand, if you are familiar with this.
I teach tags. I don't teach elements prominently until I teach XML or
DOM. I do teach good nesting and closing habits for tags and I use the
term "element", but I focus my description of the document around the
tags, not around elements that may not even exist until after parsing.
This is where I gave up on your tutorial.
This is a significant and complex issue, and the good answers to it are
far from obvious. I certainly wouldn't give up on this tutorial, for
how they've handled it (OTOH some "tutorials" are sheer garbage
because of it)
