The easiest way I find to get the basics of it are two general foundations.
If you want something bolded, italicised, underlined, start a new paragraph, get a line break, etc. Typically, all you need to do is put the first letter of the word in brackets... then finish it with the slash.
For paragaph... <p> and this is the stuff inside, to end it... </p>
Bold n'stuff also works like that.
The other one is that you can always look at other websites to understand how it works. Just view their sorce, if you understand a bit of something, and you want to see how it works completely, you can see how another website did it and change it to make your own form.
(And I won't go into tables and frames {curse frames})
Posts: 1831 | Registered: Jan 2003
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And yesterday's version of HTML had huge problems if you tried to do anything even moderately complex.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Wait until you try to get css/html to look the same in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Then we'll see how cool you think it is.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: May 2000
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A lot of the problem is people trying to do table based designs in CSS, I've found. When I started approaching designs from a semantic perspective, which markup I then styles, I found my going got a lot easier.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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As you're beginning to teach yourself HTML, try learning CSS too. Learning CSS now will help you out a lot in the long run. It gives you much more precise control over what is displayed, and is very nice and flexible.
I'm currently trying to teach myself to use CSS better, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting things to work right. (And I'm going to try to pretend IE doesn't exist so I don't have to deal with it.)
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More seriously, while any website must consider the (unfortunate given its severe rendering flaws) dominance of IE, the best thing to do when writing a web page generally is to ignore IE, in a sense. While there's the occasional thing one just shouldn't do (use any beyond relatively simple CSS selectors, for instance), the way to get a page to look good across browsers is usually to write the page in a standards compliant manner, and then tweak it so IE doesn't decide everything should be 3 pixels in random directions.
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Seriously, I don't have a problem with my website and conversions... the only difference is I believe in IE it's a bit darker. ^_^
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Vadon: try maintaining a site with more than a handful of pages which is updated regularly using POH (Plain Old HTML) and you'll soon kill yourself. Its an exercise in self-torture.
The enormous ease of update and alteration that CSS based design leads to is wonderful.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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I've been converted. But the CMS software I use still insists on putting each element in its own table. So far I've managed to work around it, but yikes! Is it painful.
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Mambo will be pure CMS in the next release, and I like the other features it has enough to put up with it.
It is nice developing dynamic web code and not even caring about formatting. Slap a class or div on it and you're done.
I released an open source search plugin for one of the Mambo galleries, and it's fun seeing it get spread across dozens of web sites. RSS sure makes things look more popular than they are.
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Well, I don't have more than a handfull of pages. But I do write my HTMLs all through notepad. I used to have problems, but I found a way around them. (For example my tables used to all go up into each other.)
I fixed that by just using one table, since then I've had no trouble.
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My favorite IE render screwup was when I redid the nav block on the top left here with CSS to show that it could be done and looked exactly the same when I used Arial instead of a $300 Adobe font that they used instead. What happened was because of IE's three pixl error,the entire thing was rendered correctly....except everything below "Beloit College" was moved down a line, and right below on the left corner said "tics." When highlighted, the corresponding letters in "Athletics" were also highlighted, why IE decided to rerender only four letters, I don't know. But adding three pixels to the div element fixed it without changing how it looked like. And don't get me started on the lack of alpha transparencies, I ended up putting a background colour in for IE and using child processes (which IE doesn't understand) to define the real background (a png). I hate that I have to do so much hackery to get things working right, but I'm glad IE's inconsistancies are as such that there's a workaround for every one of IE's stupidities. Satyagraha
Posts: 359 | Registered: Jun 2001
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