Viddler

We will, generally, be following strict. The difference is that "transitional" gives you a little more wiggle-room. The main reason you might want this wiggle-room is when you dump other people's code in your own. It's hard to know whether someone else's (e.g., YouTube) "embed" code will be valid--but in many cases it is not.

Depends on what you mean by "break up" :). Span is used to be able to indicate segments INSIDE a block. So, for example, if you wanted to use a class to label each name of an author, and do something special with that, you could use span. If you used div, it would bump it off to a new line...

Not sure I am EXACTLY sure what you mean, but I often find myself enthralled by myself... :).

The classic example here is Helvetica, which still ends up being distributed with Mac, but not PC. Some googling will give you lists of PC & Mac standard fonts. Since there are a lot of linux distributions, no way to know in that case, and although there are other OSs, that covers 99% of web users. But remember, serif, sans-serif, fantasy, and cursive are the default fonts available on *any* browser.

This is all via firebug, yes.

Not so much. Meta tags are mainly to make sure you put your best foot forward to search engines.

That's right, in the same directory as index.html. (For now; in fact, it can go anywhere on the server.) You link to it in a way analogous to linking to images, but using the link tag instead of the img tag.

It isn't :). In those cases, you have to save it as an image. But of course, this doesn't protect it either. Anyone can download and use these fonts and images.

Style sheets are said to "cascade" because multiple styles can be asserted at different point along the HTTP process. The author might provide several styles that apply to an element, and the reading device and user can apply further styles, if they wish. All of these interact, with the most local rules taking precedence, and then turning to increasingly distant rules to find one that applies.

I'm assuming the comment ate your "div" in the above. A div is basically a way of identifying and labeling a block of text.

It's just a name I made up. I want to name each of these chunks of text. I could have called it (via id=) "peanut." But since I plan on using this chunk as a header, calling it "header" makes sense...

Footers are frequently found on sites, if that's what you mean. Often they have contact information or credits.

Well, drat, definitely ate your tag on that one, and I cannot guess...

"Looking at" was perhaps a poor choice of wording. "Identify" is what I should have said.

In other words, we label these things so that when we get to the CSS, we have something to "address." Otherwise, how would you identify pieces? I guess you could say "this style applied to lines 5-10 of the index.html page" but that would be more difficult and far less powerful. So, we identify each piece of the HTML page we want to be able to apply styling to.

So, "div" is used when you want to get a "handle" on some part of the page so that you can apply styles to it. Sometimes, the part of the page you want to apply stuff to already aligns perfectly with a tag. So, for example, if you want to apply a style to the whole page, you can just use "body", you don't need to set up your own div. But in many (most?) cases, you are trying to define a chunk of the page that isn't already defined by a unique HTML tag.