This set of pages started life in mid 2004. Mostly because I was beginning to post a fair bit, in what was then iChat Discussion Area, and I wanted to keep some often requested bits somewhere. Also I had Posted the first of the iChat FAQs in the New FAQ folder that had been created. At the time there was a limit to the size of those posts with the sopftwarwe that Apple was using then and it seemed to me that I could do with somewhere that expanded on these somewhat.
At first the pages were on an mac.com homepage and made with the same tools as everyone else. But like you do - you want yours to be significantly different. So I looked on the Mac Magazine's CDs that I had to find out what was there.
Enter FreeWay2.5 Lite Web site for current products. This was a application that would take a page layout where you could place you things and then convert them into a full size .gif that you uploaded as your page. This was fine as far as What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get but people could not download the info by highlighting it as it was, in fact, part of a larger picture. Also it was a complete nightmare to try and redesign a page.
So then came using FrontPage from Microsoft (and on a PC at that). This was a very strange place to be. It has a very odd layout that it not page like at all (or at least as I remember). but it did give the chance to see the Basic HTML code play with it a bit.
Your basic page has to have several key parts or Elements
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"><html><head><title></title></head><body>This is my first web page</body></html>
As you can see here, A DOCTYPE, the html element, the head, then the title and after the title and head have been closed in the right order, the body element (your webpage goes in the space) before the body is closed and the html to end the page. This sort of thing can be created in a text editor as long as it can save in HTML format.
Depending how good you editor is at saving what you type in the way of formatting you may get a reasonable page with the spaces between paragraphs and and indents as well. But mostly a simple editor will just save the text you type as a single stream of words. So I started to look around by searching on Google. That led me to these sites.
htmldog.com I have linked to the beginners page.
htmlgoodies.com Again a beginners page.
cwru.edu This is a list of the Tags for HTML but look for links to Chapter one from there.
There are others that you can find in a Google search for HTML.
That lead be to look at the View Page Source item in the Browsers' View menu. From there I found that some people were using something called CSS (Cascade Style Sheets) and much of their formatting appeared to be invisible. So to more sites.
w3scools.com A good one as it lets you practice changes to see what certain things look like.
Web Design Group Another basic starter.
CSS/edge Tricks and links from Meyerweb.
CSS play This is from Stu Nichols and has recently undergone an update. Useful stuff about different browser considerations.
htmldog.com again. This time for my menu.
and usamriid.army.mil just to show what I would like to do next with the menu. (Mouseover the menu).
© 2005 Ralph Johns