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However you build a Web site, it consists fundamentally of pages of text, marked up with other text in <brackets like this> that tells Web browsers what the text should look like, how it should be arranged on the page, what it links to, and how any images fit in. The stuff in brackets is called hypertext markup language, or HTML.

Back in August, my friend Alistair began a project to convert his site from a spaghetti of six-year-old HTML code to the newer, more formalized XHTML (extensible HTML) standard. So far he hasn't made too much progress, but it's a big job, and he's had far more important things on his mind.

Luckily for me, I totally redesigned this site in June 2000, three months after registering the penmachine.com domain, and tried to stick as closely to the HTML 4.0 Transitional specification as I could. XHTML is not too far from HTML 4, so when I decide to move penmachine.com to XHTML, it shouldn't be too much of a hassle.

With that in mind, I bought a big fat book in the remainder bin at Save-On Foods to help me learn more about XHTML. That I find it interesting reading, as I do some dictionaries and style guides, tells me I'm at least in the right business when people pay me for Web work.

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