considerations

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The final words of this course will be dedicated to some tips, tricks and advice from someone who had to find out the hard way. Please, feel free to disagree with me, or completely ignore what's presented on this page.

If you encounter problems with the display of you material, check the following

overlapping tags

avoid the following:

  <B>bold text <I>bold italic text</B> italic text</I>

but use

  <B>bold text <I>bold italic text</I></B> <I>italic text</I>

markup inside anchors

avoid the following:

  <A HREF="destination.html"><H1>link text</H1></A>

but use

  <H1><A HREF="destination.html">link text</A></H1>

closing tags and quotes

a lot of problems are caused by forgetting to type a closing quote or a required closing tag. Using a syntax highlighting editor can help trace these problems.

And don't forget, no matter what operating system is used, in a HTTP URL the separator between directories is always a '/'.

For several reasons, it might be that a browser doesn't display the material as it should, even though it is HTML 3.2 compliant, and works on another browser. One obvious reason is that the browser is old, so a recent version should solve any problems. Strangely, there also are problems with recent browsers that claim to support HTML 3.2. One example is table alignment in Microsoft Internet Explorer. What can I say...
I maintain that conforming to the specifications is your best bet.

Use whitespace and comments to clarify you source.

Remember to call your base page index.html (or index.htm), since this is the page a browser will open if not supplied with a file name.

Using frames in page layout may still prove difficult with various browsers, and is not supported by HTML 3.2. Tables can also be used to get good layout.

Provide a mechanism for navigation within your pages (eg. 'back', or 'previous-up-next').

Check external links you provide on your page on a regular basis. They may have gone stale.

Although not intended in the definition, GIFs can be used for small animations, but the use of animated GIFs make a page very busy, and load times may increase significantly. There's nothing like a few animated gifs and some blinking text to make your pages look like Disneyland (if you like that kind of thing). Oh, and don't forget the pink moiré background...

Save a formatted page without content for use as a template. It saves time, and provides a uniform style throughtout your pages.

Use 'view source' on a page you like, to see how something is done, or use 'save as' to copy the entire page to your local system (use discretion when copying material since it may be copyrighted).

You really shouldn't place material on your page that is not present on your server. A lot of people have to pay for material being downloaded from their sites, and abusing their generosity is normally considered stealing.

Check the links section for additional resources on web design.

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