One of the promises I made to you, the readers of HTML with Style, is that I would teach you proper HTML. Some of this has been made obvious so far, and if you've read other tutorials on HTML you will have noticed that the HTML with Style Tutorials take a different approach.

One of the things I assume is that my readers are not experts. I do not take anything for granted. Other than the requirement that you can use a text editor and a Web browser, nothing else is asked of you. Another assumption is that my readers are not idiots. I try to simplify the teaching, but not the concepts I teach.

So far, I've left a lot of unanswered questions lying around in the tutorials. This time I'm going to shed light on some of the mysteries in the previous tutorials, like why nobody likes the LINK element, why tag syntax is the strange thing that it is and why we have to put that weird thing called the Document Type Declaration (see Tutorial 1) at the top of every single document.

Some people consider what I'm about to tell you useless information for Web authors. In my opinion this information is the most important information you need to know in order for you to author good Web pages. In this tutorial I'll use what you've learned so far to show how the theory and concepts behind HTML can be used to make you Web pages better.