From: Jukka Korpela Subject: Re: Beginner HTML tutorials??? Date: 2000/01/29 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 579074299 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <_NTj4.276$sN.21858@typhoon1.rdc-detw.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: usenet@nntp.hut.fi X-Trace: nntp.hut.fi 949129196 26351 130.233.221.44 (29 Jan 2000 06:59:56 GMT) Organization: Helsinki University of Technology Mime-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: 29 Jan 2000 06:59:56 GMT Newsgroups: alt.html On Fri, 28 Jan 2000 16:48:06 GMT, Michael Hamm wrote: >Or another good one, if I may say so, is at the URL below. - - >http://www.crosswinds.net/~msh210/html.html I agree, it's very good, and a modern one (many of the older tutorials are years old, so they may have some old-fashioned attitudes). But as you write there, "each tutorial is a little different from the others", and some people get more out of a tutorial written in a style that suits them, and one might understand the basics better if one reads them from two (or even more) different presentations, so here's a collection of other good tutorials (yes, mine is there too): http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/ ( short, but informative ) http://www.awpa.asn.au/html/index.html ( enjoyably written ) http://www.webreference.com/html/tutorials/ ( lots of nice stuff ) http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/html-primer.html http://www.cwru.edu/help/introHTML/ Your tutorial looks very nice - I'm afraid I can't estimate how easy it is to people with no previous knowledge, but I suppose it should pose no serious problems. A few details: "A tag, officially called an element, - - " is an unnecessary terminology confusion. "Tag" is a perfectly correct term - for a _tag_, like . An _element_ is something like bar (consisting of a start tag and an end tag and some content between them). _Some_ elements consist of a start tag only, and the end tag might be omissible, and so on, but I'd suggest just dropping the statement "officially called an element". "The values of the attributes, on the other hand, are case-sensitive." Well, they may or may not be case-sensitive. Align="center" and align="cEnTeR" are equivalent. It really depends on the attribute; and even on browsers (e.g. target names are case-insensitive by the specifications, but browsers are known to get this wrong). I'm not sure whether a tutorial should discuss the tag at all. As you mention, "browsers are supposed to put in a quotation mark when they encounter a or tag, but many don't" (which is an understatement I'd say - does _any_ widely used browser do that?) and it's better to use quotation marks instead. "See there for details" isn't a particularly exemplary way of linking; it looks odd on paper, and in a Usenet posting, doesn't it? ("See the descriptions of these elements for details" would be longer, but more reasonable.) The and tags would need some caveats. I don't think there many browsers (is there any?) that supports them, so if marking changes is important, some workarounds need to be considered. The discussion of CSS is very nice too, but I think you should make a note about setting text color whenever you set background color, and vice versa. It makes things a bit more complicated, but it's really part of the game that can't be ignored. If this list looks long, it's just because i picked up _all_ items I had some disagreement with, and as some people may know I _am_ picky, so I hope this will be understood as applauds, as it was intended to be taken. -- Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ *** Happy 19100 to all! ***