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

I like the look of that one

manda

* reads the page *



Stay away from it! Stay away!

Just after i first asked the question, I had to go on a course for data base, spreadsheet and word prosesing, so that had to put on the back burner,

but now I am going to start again,
why is that one no good

manda

Do you want the technical, pedantic explanation?

yes please

( but not to technical

manda

First problem: the page itself is broken (never a good sign for a page that purports to be a tutorial. When I open it in MSIE (the only browser I have on this PC) I get errors.

Second problem: the page is pretty out of date. It's a guide to writing HTML3/4, when there's not much point in learning that because things are moving on, and XHTML will be more useful to you anyway (it's all about writing valid XML: not , for instance).

Third problem: heading tags should NEVER be used for merely changing the size of text . They're for outlining - misusing them in that way can SERIOUSLY break the way the page is displayed in some browsers!

Fourth problem: this is a little subjective, but it makes things much easier for you if you specify text sizes/fonts and colours in a separate Cascaded Style Sheet (http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/). If you use one stylesheet globally across all the pages in your site you can make the process of changing formatting much, much easier than going through the whole site changing each and ever tag. Besides which, placing formatting within your (X)HTML page is deprecated.

Fifth problem: background images are non-standard features - you can't rely on them.

Sixth problem: SPACES INSIDE ATTRIBUTE VALUES!

7th: the "How to make a link that opens a new browser Window" section is bogus. The correct attribute/value pair is target="_blank".

8th: the tag?

And various other gripes. Stay clear, stay well clear. There are many better guides. I'll find some....

Try:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/basics.html

(The above tutorial isn't XHTML either, but at least it's correct).

Background images aren't non-standard, haven't been for a long time. What you can't actually rely on is that the client will be capable of loading your chosen image, and as such you should make sure you set a background colour for your text as close to the image's overall colour as possible, so that your text will be readable if the image is loaded or not. Of course, the colour might be ignored too, but in that case the text colour will probably also be ignored, so you shouldn't have any problems.

Oops, my bad.

I was thinking of XHTML - just checked the HTML 4.01 specs, and it seems you're right

I have started to use that page,,is it ok

manda

Yeah, background images aren't in XHTML at all, but that's because they're formatting, and ALL visual formatting is done with CSS if you're using proper XHTML. It's a much better way to do things!

Thanks

manda