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We all learn to write a letter sooner or later; it is also a useful example to test out our text formatting skills! In this assessment you'll be given a letter to mark up to test basic and advanced HTML text formatting skills, including hyperlinks, plus we'll test your familiarity with some HTML <head> contents.

Prerequisites: Before attempting this assessment you should have already worked through Getting started with HTML, What's in the head? Metadata in HTML, HTML text fundamentals, Creating hyperlinks, and Advanced text formatting.
Objective: To test basic and advanced HTML text formatting and hyperlink skills, and knowledge of what goes in the HTML <head>.

Starting point

To get this assessment started, you should go and grab the raw text you need to mark up, and the CSS you need to include in your HTML. Create a new .html file using your text editor to do your work in (or alternatively use a site like JSBin or Thimble to do your assessment.)

Project brief

For this project, your task is to mark up a letter that needs to be hosted on a university intranet. The letter is a response from a research fellow to a prospective PhD student concerning their application to the university.

Block/structural semantics:

  • You should structure the overall document with an appropriate structure including doctype, and <html>, <head> and <body> elements.
  • The letter in general should be marked up with a structure of paragraphs and headings, with the exception of the below points. There is one top level heading (the "Re:" line) and three second level headings.
  • The semester start dates, study subjects and exotic dances should be marked up using an appropriate list type.
  • The two addresses can just be put inside paragraphs. The <address> element is not appropriate for them — think about why. In addition, each line of the addresses should sit on a new line, but not be in a new paragraph.

Inline semantics:

  • The names of the sender and receiver (and "Tel" and "Email") should be marked up with strong importance.
  • The four dates in the document should be given appropriate elements containing machine-readable dates.
  • The first address and first date in the letter should be given a class attribute value of "sender-column"; the CSS you'll add later will then cause these to be right aligned, as should be the case in a classic letter layout.
  • The five acronyms/abbreviations in the main text of the letter should be marked up to provide expansions of each acronym/abbreviation.
  • The six sub/superscripts should be marked up appropriately — in the chemical formulae,  and the numbers 103 and 104 (they should be 10 to the power or 3 and 4, respectively).
  • Try to mark up at least two appropriate words in the text with strong importance/emphasis.
  • There are two places where a hyperlink should be added; add appropriate links with titles. For the location that the links point to, just use http://example.com.
  • The university motto quote and citation should be marked up with appropriate elements.

The head of the document:

  • The character set of the document should be specified as utf-8 using an appropriate meta tag.
  • The author of the letter should be specified in an appropriate meta tag.
  • The provided CSS should be included inside an appropriate tag.

Hints and tips

  • Use the W3C HTML validator to validate your HTML; you'll get bonus points if it validates.
  • You don't need to know any CSS to do this assessment; you just need to put the provided CSS inside an HTML element.


The following screenshot shows an example of what the letter might look like after being marked up.





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Last updated by: sideshowbarker,