In case you haven't heard, the web has outgrown the old HTML markup language. HTML is a simple language used to describe the sections of a web page. For instance the tag <h1> is used to denote a level one header. Putting text within this tag will cause this :

This is a level one header

However HTML does not describe what the information is inside the <h1> tag. Enter XML (extensible markup language). XML is a language used to describe another markup language. Instead of using tags to denote how to display text, you can create your own markup language to describe what the information is your displaying. For instance, if you were to display a list of books, traditionally it would be done simliar to this

As you can see, XML allows the information to marked up as to what KIND of information it is. This allows for information to be searched for much faster on the web, and allows for much more organized pages. However most of the existing web pages are in HTML and most browsers will not correctly handle XML yet. To ease the transition to the new XML standard, the W3C created a new language XHTML.

This new language is very close to the old HTML, while beginning to conform to the new rules of XML. In this way, the existing HTML pages can still be used, but can slowly begin to utilize XHTML, to prepare for XML. This site is now in this process. While our pages still use HTML syntax, we are beginning to code them with the new XHTML rules. Eventually we will be XHTML compliant.

The next question then is how to you make the information display the way you want it to. This is where CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) comes in. Style Sheets have been used for years in word processors. They tell the browser how tags should be displayed. For instance, instead of using the <h1> tag, you could set the style for that piece of data with an inline style sheet. Inline refers to it being inside the tag.

Now, we have set the header tag to display with normal type, bold face and 14pt Arial. Now we decide how the information should be displayed, instead of the browser. Another (and preferable) way to do this would be to create an external style sheet which would describe the look of each tag. This one style sheet could then be sotred and whenever changes were made to this one file, the entire site would then change accordingly. this frees the web designer from hard coding the look of the page into every single page. Which then requires updating every page amnually. Style Sheets save time and give full control to the designer

Unfortunatley, not every browser obeys style sheets completely. We have provided a list of the best browsers. These obey style sheets almost completely. From now, this site will make extensive use of style sheets to control how all information is displayed. This is the future of the web and we are moving ahead with the new standards.