A few notes on web tech
This is just a few things I have noticed while playing with creating web pages using the variouse “newer” standards out there. At least they were “newer” when I wrote the comments on them.
HTML4
This seems perfectly good for developing web pages in, however for some reason IE on Windows does not seem to present CSS styled pages quite right when they are written in HTML4. This is not as much of a problem it would appear when pages are writen in XHTML however so I woud recommend trying to convert pages using the freely available HTML Tidy program.
The official reference for HTML4 is at http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
Here is a simple tutorial http://www.w3schools.com/html/
Here is a “cheat sheet” http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_quick.asp
Character Codes
| Result | Description | Entity Name | Entity Number |
|---|---|---|---|
| non-breaking | space | |   |
| < | less than | < | < |
| > | greater than | > | > |
| & | ampersand | & | & |
| ” | quotation mark | " | " |
| ’ | apostrophe | ' (does not work in IE) | ' |
| Result | Description | Entity Name | Entity Number |
|---|---|---|---|
| ¢ | cent | ¢ | ¢ |
| £ | pound | £ | £ |
| ¥ | yen | ¥ | ¥ |
| § | section | § | § |
| © | copyright | © | © |
| ® | registered trademark | ® | ® |
| Å~ | multiplication | × | × |
| ÷ | division | ÷ | ÷ |
XHTML
XHTML is fairly nice to develop web pages in, especially as it’s fairly simply to get it “nicely” formatted with indents using variouse programs including HTML Tidy. It also appears to work in most browsers with the one cautionary note that Firefox and Safari both work fine with XHTML documents that have a .xhtml name, however IE in windows simply shows these as XML documents. So even if writen in XHTML the documents should be saved as .html files so that IE on windows displays them as web pages.
The official reference for XHTML is at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
Here is a simple tutorial http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/
CSS
Quite a nice toy to play with once you have your head around things. Particularly the “where to display on a page” type things like float:right etc. This allows for nice column layouts that auto resize with viewing page and the like and leaves the underlying HTML/XHTML much simpler than if tables are used. Re-arranging things on a page is easier too as it usually just involved shifting the order of things in the HTML, which is really easy to do in vi, rather than having to spend hours fiddling with tables to re-arange stuff. Admittedly this may not be an issue with GUI tools but I like good old VI and a browser to preview the pages with. The only GUI tool that I have seen which adds value in developing CSS other than saving you from remembering syntax and names is StyleMaster. And the only thing I found useful in that is it’s “X-Ray” functionality whereby you click something in the preview pane and it tells you which style bits apply to that part of the page ... but it does have some peculiarities in my opinion.
Acouplt of places exist that give tutorials on CSS that are useful:
