Let's start right at the beginning of an HTML5 document. Screw this part up and you could spend a long time wondering why your page doesn't behave as it should. The first few lines should look something like this:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset=utf-8>
Let's go through these tags one by one. Generally, they will be the same every time you create a web page but trust me, it's worth understanding what they do.
The doctype is a means of communicating to the browser the type of document we have. Otherwise, it wouldn't necessarily know how to use the content within it.
We opened our document with the HTML5 doctype declaration:
<!DOCTYPE html>
If you're a fan of lowercase, then <!doctype html> is just as good. It makes no difference.
This is a welcome change from HTML 4.01 pages. They used to start something like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3...