The University of Pennsylvania's Online Computing Magazine
|
 |
October 1996 - Volume 13:3 [Printout | Contents | Search ]
By Judy Smith The easiest way to learn HTML is by example: Find a page you like, view the source, then adapt the tags for your purposes. It's the way of the web. And it is a good way to begin. But sooner or later it's going to lead to trouble. Someone is going to flame your illegible "non-standard" pages. That's when you realize that pages that look great on your web browser don't play well "cross-platform." Time to develop an understanding of HTML standards? Pay attention to HTML 3.2 tags if you want to understand the current set of constraints for cross-platform compatibility. All browsers should be able to handle HTML 3.2 tags, although text-based browsers like lynx still have trouble with table tags -- especially when they are used to control page layout rather than to define tabular data structures. You need to understand this standard if you want to know what works where and why -- whether you decide to play the standards game or not. Yet it's table tags in combination with graphic elements that currently provide the only way to design pages that even approach the look of professional documents. The rigid separation between structure, the realm of HTML, and presentation, the realm of style sheets, never worked because the standards bodies couldn't agree on a style sheet standard that browser vendors could implement and that page designers could use. But now, the style sheet specification is fairly well understood, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 uses it, Netscape promised to use it in Navigator 4.0, and site designers have begun to take a long hard look at the promise of styles sheets: gaining precise typographical and graphical control over documents without losing cross-platform compatibility, but with the added benefit of improving document download time. Although a style sheet war between Microsoft and Netscape seems immanent, if you're interested in future directions of HTML, look at the draft Cougar specification (the successor to HTML 3.2), but pay special attention to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). And yes, the easiest way to learn style sheets is by example.
Drinking from the fountainWhile documents describing basic style sheets are beginning to flood the web, most sites have been awaiting the arrival of Netscape 4.0 before moving aggressively ahead. Here are a few interesting "how-to" documents.
The standards gameThe standards documents at W3C can be slow going for the average page designer. If you want a short reference that clearly distinguishes the official tags from extensions, try Kevin Werbach's Bare Bones Guide to HTML.
|