Owen Rees: Opinions about the web

On correct HTML

This is an opportunity to display some 'attitude'. I believe that web pages should be written to conform to the HTML standards. I also believe that most pages should be designed to let readers get the information they want quickly and easily. This page is relatively plain, not just because I don't want to waste time on the cute tricks I am quite able to use, but also because those tricks have no place on a page of this nature. There are plenty of sites that offer advice on style for web pages, but one of the best places to start is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Anyone writing serious pages (rather than writing for fun as I am now) should study and follow the advice there, especially things like the accessibilty guidelines. They also have a validator that you can use to make sure that your HTML is not broken syntactically. If you want a laugh, look at "web pages that suck" which collects examples of pages illustrating poor design choices. Many of the pages listed there show that the authors are skilled in the technology, but have little idea how to apply that skill to good effect.

Tools and Resources

I created this page with HTML-Kit. I like it because it has tidy, the HTML cleanup tool integrated with it.

Here are some sites I have found useful for information about HTML:

W3C HTML page, the home of the HTML specifications.
Web Design Group have a definition that is sometimes easier to follow.
HTML Code Tutorial includes information about various non-standard elements, but does not always point out which elements are deprecated in newer versions of HTML.

I also like style sheets - this page uses a style sheet to control the colours and the layout, including the menu with its "pop-up" effect (if your browser supports it). Here are some sites with useful CSS resources:

W3C CSS page, the home of the CSS specifications.
BlueRobot.com: home of the Layout Reservoir
glish.com: CSS Layout Techniques: for Fun and Profit
A List Apart: practical CSS tips, tricks & techniques.
css/edge: a playground and a proving ground for CSS. This is where I got the ideas and techniques for the popups on the menu.

I have been doing some experiments with CSS positioning.

A place I find useful for questions, answers and general discussion about web authoring is the newsgroup uk.net.web.authoring. There are quite a few other newsgroups on the topic, but I find them a bit too busy and noisy for my taste.

Did you know...

Web browsers do not always do what you expect. Here are some exercises for your browser to illustrate the point.

Does an internal link that is a bare fragment identifier make the page reload? It is not supposed to. This is the target of the internal link on this page.

Here are two copies of the same page, served as a plain text page and an HTML page, but does your browser respect the distinction?