h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi all

I have just started a web page, and I was wondering if you know a good web site where I can learn HTML

I am good at GuideML ( well sort of )
am I right in thinking that it is almost the same

hope you can help

manda

Yup, it's pretty much the same, although GuideML is pretty much a scaled down version of HTML.

Follow this link and take your pick

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=html+tutorial&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

That was quick

Thank you

manda

We aim to please.

If you want to be really fancy, try this:

http://validator.w3.org/

It will check that you're using proper html... browsers will always try and do their best, even if you break the rules -- but doing so is generally a bad idea, 'cause different browsers may fudge the result differently...

It starts to get a little complicated, but if you can use CSS (cascading style sheets -- took me a while to get the right three letters ), that's really handy... amongst other things, it lets you define what particular tags will look like...

For example, instead of using and so on around every hyperlink, you just add a bit of CSS code to tell it what a hyperlink looks like, and then you don't have to do anything else...

Anyone know any good examples/tutorial pages?...

The best bit about CSS is you can link to the same file from every page on your website... so you make a single change to it, and the look of your entire site changes!

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/

www.w3schools.com

CK

if you are halfway (or, say, 30%) fluent in German, just google for 'selfhtml' -- all you ever wanted to know!

Thank you all

I think I have got some to look at there

manda

Be sure to download the W3C's official HTML 4.01 spec from http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/ and read through that. It's a bit technical but it's the most in depth document you'll get. If you want to stay current you should also look at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/ which is XHTML. I would recommend learning XHTML 1.0 but the spec is written in terms of "how is this different from HTML 4.01" so you have to start with the first link.

w3schools is an excellent resource for learning web languages. It's also in your best interest to make sure the W3C validator will validate your pages as mentioned - http://validator.w3.org - and to use stylesheets instead of formatting tags like because you can reuse your formatting. You can find info on stylesheets at http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/.

I do web development professionally and I can tell you from experience that there are a number of good resources on the web but there are also quite a few terrible ones. If you stick to W3C tools to start you'll be better off for it later.

Interestingly, IE appears to be 'broken'. The latest version of my website seems to be rendered correctly by Opera, Mozilla, Nautilus (and can be viewed successfully in Lynx ) but not in IE.

Microsfot Kludge-ware.... moral of the story: test your website in as many browsers as possible.

I can't remember the exact details, but I remember reading that IE5.x for the Mac had a problem with cascading style sheets; when an HTML element is redefined many times, the browser is supposed to take the last definition, but Mac IE stuck with the first... Thus, if you redefined, say, your paragraph font in a "local" style definition, all other browsers would respect that except IE for Mac which continued to show the font specified in the external style sheet. I had that problem with my "Paranormal" site, which looked fine in every browser/machine combo except IE/Mac.

The annoying thing is that if you reported an issue like that with, say, Mozilla, a fix would probably be in (publicly-accessible) CVS within a couple of hours; with MS you don't know if they've even got your bug report, let alone whether they're ever going to do something with it...

Anyway, MSIE keeps dying on me, so I've switched to Opera as my default browser.

I only use IE for Windows Updates and my Internet Banking. Otherwise, I use Mozilla as my default - sadly, my bank's login screen doesn't work properly in Mozilla.

Yes, of course - banks say things about security with non-IE browsers, ignoring that Mozilla's probably more secure than IE has ever been...

A nice simple one to start with is
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Alley/5616/mshtml.htm

Unfortunately it's also an excellent example of how to write broken HTML... *sigh*

I actually never wrote HTML, I just used it to learn more of Guide-ML

Broken HTML is definitely not a good path to GuideML...