XHTML and CSS are Internet technologies being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c.org).
XHTML and CSS are the building blocks, the stuff of which web pages are made. They're not programming languages, rocket science or some mysterious code that only geeks learn to do.
XHTML and CSS are formatting and layout systems needed to create (markup) web pages. They are both rather straightforward and logical. That's good news!!
XHTML is...
used to make paragraphs, tables, lists, links, and text boxes - among other things - on web pages. It provides the essential ingredients for putting a page together, much like building a house that needs a roof, rooms, walls, and a basement. It provides structure to a web document.
You may have heard about its earlier version, HTML. Sometimes people refer to it as Tags. XHTML stands for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language.
See how XHTML works with the Free Trial, the Code Tester, a tool used in the Workshop.
What does XHTML look like? For this page it looks like this.
CSS stands for...
Cascading Style Sheets. It's the way we bring color, typography, and layout to a web page. It works alongside XHTML. If we were building a house, CSS would be the house color, window treatments, floor coverings, and furniture placement.
It provides the decoration, the sizzle of a site.
Put 'em both together and you've got your formula to do something useful on the web and make some magic at the same time.
Just what does CSS look like? The styling information for this page, and for most of this web site, is in this file.