If you step back in history a bit, you'll find that the Web was, at first, all about text and links. That it's become a vibrant, colorful, visual environment for the majority of its users was an accident, really. The original intention of the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, was to create a multiplatform means for his fellow scientists to share information, publish their data, and be able to link a reference within an essay directly to that related reference. The man was a physicist, not a designer, and he was working in an environment that didn't even have a graphical user interface. I'm talking the old-fashioned Internet, seen as green or amber text on a black background.
Given its humble origins, the Web has come a long way. It's a highly visual environment now, and before CSS became widely available for use, people creating websites relied on elements meant for text to create visual results, such as adding extra line breaks to get additional whitespace on the page.
Now that you can use CSS to effectively manage such visual concerns, the focus has shifted back to using text elements as they should be used: to format text. So despite the emergence of a highly visual, highly interactive Web, text and linking remain the primary meat and potatoes of any website worth its salt. Anyone working with text is encouraged to use text and links in a meaningful way.
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to work with text and links efficiently and appropriately. From the logic of headers and lists to a variety of linking options, you'll find out what it means to create great text in noble fashion, making your content as royal as can be.
