XHTML allows you to denote headings in your document, at up to six different levels.

The largest and most prominent heading is h1, then h2, continuing down to h6.

The element's content is the text of the heading.

Generally, an XHTML page should have one first level heading (h1). This can contain many second level headings (h2), which can in turn contain many third level headings. Each hn element should have the same element, but one further up the hierarchy, preceding it. Leaving gaps in the numbering is to be avoided.

XHTML supports a single paragraph element, p.

A block quotation is an extended quotation from another document that should not appear within the current paragraph.

You can present the user with three types of lists, ordered, unordered, and definition.

Typically, each entry in an ordered list will be numbered, while each entry in an unordered list will be preceded by a bullet point. Definition lists are composed of two sections for each entry. The first section is the term being defined, and the second section is the definition of the term.

Ordered lists are indicated by the ol element, unordered lists by the ul element, and definition lists by the dl element.

Ordered and unordered lists contain listitems, indicated by the li element. A listitem can contain textual content, or it may be further wrapped in one or more p elements.

Definition lists contain definition terms (dt) and definition descriptions (dd). A definition term can only contain inline elements. A definition description can contain other block elements.

You can indicate that text should be shown to the user exactly as it is in the file. Typically, this means that the text is shown in a fixed font, multiple spaces are not merged into one, and line breaks in the text are significant.

In order to do this, wrap the content in the pre element.

Mark up tabular information using the table element. A table consists of one or more table rows (tr), each containing one or more cells of table data (td). Each cell can contain other block elements, such as paragraphs or lists. It can also contain another table (this nesting can repeat indefinitely). If the cell only contains one paragraph then you do not need to include the p element.

A cell can span multiple rows and columns. To indicate this, add the rowspan and/or colspan attributes, with values indicating the number of rows or columns that should be spanned.

You have two levels of emphasis available in XHTML, em and strong. em is for a normal level of emphasis and strong indicates stronger emphasis.

Typically, em is rendered in italic and strong is rendered in bold. This is not always the case, however, and you should not rely on it. According to best practices, webpages only hold structural and semantical information and stylesheets are later applied to use these two so you should think of semantics not formatting when using these tags.

If you have content that should be rendered in a fixed pitch (typewriter) typeface, use tt (for “teletype”).

In order to include a link to another document on the WWW you must know the URL of the document you want to link to.

The link is indicated with a, and the href attribute contains the URL of the target document. The content of the element becomes the link, and is normally indicated to the user in some way (underlining, change of color, different mouse cursor when over the link, and so on).

These links will take the user to the top of the chosen document.

Linking to a point within another document (or within the same document) requires that the document author include anchors that you can link to.

Anchors are indicated with a and the id attribute instead of href.

To link to a named part of a document, write a normal link to that document, but include the id of the anchor after a # symbol.

If you are linking to a named anchor within the same document then you can omit the document's URL, and just include the name of the anchor (with the preceding #).