Since this page will be a valid HTML document, I need to start out with an empty HTML container:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Then, I add in the basic CSS styles to zero out the page margins, borders, and paddings. While there are other standard CSS styles I normally add to new documents, these styles are the minimum you need to get a clean layout. Add them to the head of your document:
<style type="text/css">
html, body {
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
border: 0px;
}
</style>
To start building my layout, I always put in a container element. It sometimes happens that you can get rid of the container, but for most fixed-width layouts, having the container element makes it easier to manage across different Web browsers. So in the body I put:
<div id="container"></div>
And in the CSS style sheet I put:
#container { }
