Just Got to Tell Someone About This!

This first week of class, I learned about some of the basics of HTML and XHTML coding.  What sticks out as most significant in my mind about this week is the following information:

Your First Web Page:

"The version and type of XHTML is listed in the Document Type Definition (DTD) tag (commonly called the DOCTYPE). The DTD identifies the version and type of XHTML contained in your document. Browsers and HTML code validators can use the information in the DTD when processing the Web page. The DTD tag is placed at the top of a Web page document, even before the tag. The DTD for XHTML 1.0

Transitional is as follows:

{!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd}

"You will place the DTD as the second line in each Web page document you create. The following code sample describes the anatomy of a Web page: a header section followed by a body section."
 

{html}
{head}
... header information goes here
{head}
{body}
... body information goes here
{body}
{html}

The reason why this sticks out in my mind is that I have 15 college credits in computer classes, where I worked with software programs. In the course of those classes, I had assignments that required I worked with coding.  I struggled with them, because I wasn't sure, other than computer coding, what I was working with.  Overall, we were told as a class that programming languages were for another class, and so we focused on completing the assignments without really understanding what we were doing. Given the way the material was provided, I simply copied the coding without understanding how it worked.

I think it would have been extremely helpful when doing those assignments to have been given at least a basic overall coding structure.  I believe they would have made more sense. I have always had difficulty learning the steps if I don't understand the bigger structure.