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

I'm fairly happy with the first four sections (linked to from the top of A830008), could every one give them a thorough review before I carry on please

*waves to HappyDude*

My only comment really is just a presentational one: I tend to prefer using the GuideML to separate major sections, then to show the smaller divisions. For example, "Editors" could use the GuideML, then "Text Editors" and "HTML Editors" could each use the GuideML. Then "Browsers" would be a again.

Hope that made sense; it's getting late over here so my brain is getting fuzzy...

*giggles*
good idea

... *blush* I need to pay more attention or something. Either that or get un-lazy and read the whole history again before I post.

Anyway... Feedback... Please excuse my pickiness. Please please. I'm only interested in making the article better.

There's some minor grammar mistakes in there (e.g. Where ever instead of Wherever, sight instead of site) but that can be taken care of later. As far as the content goes:

When you mention browsers you say Netscape/Mozilla Navigator. Netscape Navigator / Mozilla is technically more accurate. Should other Gecko based browsers be mentioned? "Netscape Navigator / Mozilla (and other Gecko based browsers) ..."? Technically they're all the same browser, they just have a different front-end.

I think you should clarify the difference between a tag and an element as they aren't always synonymous. An element describes the start and end tags together, e.g. This is a link would be an element whereas and are the tags that make up the element.

The tag should technically have namespace and language declarations in it, i.e. . I'm not sure if you even want to touch the concept of namespaces (probably not - they made my head hurt for a while) but language declarations are easy so I think they should be put in. You may want to just put the tag in as above, reassure the user that the gobbledygook will be explained later and then put the explanation in the attributes section where it will make more sense.

Most of the unicode escape sequences also have text representations that are a lot easier to remember. You may want to mention that.

With reference to using heading tags to change font size, you say it's not the best way - myself I think I would write that it's not the right way. It's semantic, yes, but people reading "not the best way" tend to assume "but still an acceptable way" which it really shouldn't be.

The size attribute of the font tag refers to literal size (1 is small, 7 is large); , , et al. are referring to importance/hierarchy (h1 is a heading; h2 is a subheading, etc.). The heading tags are closely related to HTML's SGML roots whereas the font tag was thrown in by Netscape because it was useful for presentation at the time.

Font face can also use "serif", "sans-serif", etc. to define a family of fonts to fall back on if the user doesn't have any of the fonts you've listed. Generally sans-serif fonts like Verdana or Arial are the easiest to read on a screen; Serif fonts like Times New Roman are better to read on paper. Probably bears mentioning.

Other than that it looks great!

Quick plug: F19585?thread=212434

H'lo again! Took a look at the plug- posted my comments on that over there.

The revised sections look great!

Oh, and all the commentary got me to looking into XHTML. I revised a couple of my smaller webpages so that they're now in W3C-validated XHTML 1.0 . However, it's going to take a while to convert my coin site. I never realize how big that thing's gotten until I have to do a site-wide overhaul like that. Same thing happened a couple years ago when I switched to style sheets..

An XHTML convert, woohoo!

Have you tried HTML Tidy? It has an option to output to XHTML. Plus it will catch any errors that might be lurking in your HTML. You can grab it from http://tidy.sourceforge.net.

HTML Tidy is a top program

Hm, I'll have to check the program out.

For now, I've been using the W3C's validator to make sure that my new pages are valid XHMTL. Prob is, it's not likely some of the things I did with my style sheets. I'm almost afraid to run my style sheet through the W3C validator for those!

I's love to look smug and say I had no problems converting stuff to xhtml and valid CSS but ...

Good, now I don't feel so bad for having all these problems!

Well, my style sheet validates as CSS1 but I have a feeling the W3C is pushing CSS2 for XHTML. *sigh* Seems like just as I get the hang of something they go and change it on me.. A conspiracy, I tell you..

CSS2 is basically CSS1 with a few brass knobs on
as long as they validate your ok...

but if you want to see what can be done with CSS2 may I suggest you check out the demos at http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/

I'm stirring up trouble again
(which is the problem with interesting questions )

F89602?thread=213739

Heh... Count me in!

Not that I love trouble, I just can't keep my nose out of stuff that I think people need to do right the first time.