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HTML textbook recommendations

2005-10-10 05:58:00 PM
Tony Cooper wrote:
Quote
You say the book wasn't worth whatever I paid for it. Yet, after
about an hour's reading I'm doing what I want to do. That makes it
worth the money as far as I'm concerned.
If the page is "seen by half a dozen people and only up for a month",
then couldn't you just phone them up and _tell_ them what's on the
page?
The fallacy is to assume that pages really are "just up for a short
while" - they tend to stick around longer than you expect, the revised
"real" version never happens when it ought to, or Google finds it and
they're in the cache for ages afterwards, even after you've taken the
page down. It's a big web out there - stuff gets seen by more people
than you'd expect.
You should always write good, modern well-structured HTML 4.01 (at
least). It's _easier_ than the nasty old cruft of yesteryear and far
quicker. However this assumes that you know how to do that and the sad
fact is that most books and training are still very poor (Castro, Lie
& Bos, Raggett or Meyer are some of the very few worth reading). If
you've picked up a turkey of a book, then you have my sympathies - you
probably spent longer than was necessary on getting what you needed
done.
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Re:HTML textbook recommendations

Tony Cooper wrote:
Quote
You say the book wasn't worth whatever I paid for it. Yet, after
about an hour's reading I'm doing what I want to do. That makes it
worth the money as far as I'm concerned.
If the page is "seen by half a dozen people and only up for a month",
then couldn't you just phone them up and _tell_ them what's on the
page?
The fallacy is to assume that pages really are "just up for a short
while" - they tend to stick around longer than you expect, the revised
"real" version never happens when it ought to, or Google finds it and
they're in the cache for ages afterwards, even after you've taken the
page down. It's a big web out there - stuff gets seen by more people
than you'd expect.
You should always write good, modern well-structured HTML 4.01 (at
least). It's _easier_ than the nasty old cruft of yesteryear and far
quicker. However this assumes that you know how to do that and the sad
fact is that most books and training are still very poor (Castro, Lie
& Bos, Raggett or Meyer are some of the very few worth reading). If
you've picked up a turkey of a book, then you have my sympathies - you
probably spent longer than was necessary on getting what you needed
done.
-

Re:HTML textbook recommendations

On 10 Oct 2005 02:58:00 -0700, "Andy Dingley" <dingbat@codesmiths.com>
wrote:
Quote
Tony Cooper wrote:

Quote
You say the book wasn't worth whatever I paid for it. Yet, after
about an hour's reading I'm doing what I want to do. That makes it
worth the money as far as I'm concerned.

If the page is "seen by half a dozen people and only up for a month",
then couldn't you just phone them up and _tell_ them what's on the
page?
You do understand that this is a page of family photographs?
How do you "tell" people about photographs? Isn't the intent of
photographs to "show" them?
Quote
The fallacy is to assume that pages really are "just up for a short
while" - they tend to stick around longer than you expect, the revised
"real" version never happens when it ought to, or Google finds it and
they're in the cache for ages afterwards, even after you've taken the
page down. It's a big web out there - stuff gets seen by more people
than you'd expect.
OK, let's say that even though I remove the page next month, someone
finds my page of family photographs in six months and there are
errors. What's the problem?
Quote
You should always write good, modern well-structured HTML 4.01 (at
least). It's _easier_ than the nasty old cruft of yesteryear and far
quicker. However this assumes that you know how to do that and the sad
fact is that most books and training are still very poor (Castro, Lie
& Bos, Raggett or Meyer are some of the very few worth reading). If
you've picked up a turkey of a book, then you have my sympathies - you
probably spent longer than was necessary on getting what you needed
done.
You shouldn't blame the book. It was copyrighted in 2000 and was
probably current at that time. If there's blame, it should be that I
haven't bought a new book and started using what is in the new book.
-

Re:HTML textbook recommendations

Tony Cooper wrote:
Quote
On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 03:39:45 GMT, "Jonathan N. Little"
<lws4art@centralva.net>wrote:


Quote
>>>No argument from me on that score, but what is "right"? If the intent
>>>is to put up a single page with a couple of images, is placing the
>>>text and the images with CSS instead of 4.01 more "right"?
>>
>>I think you are mistaken here, 4.01 governs the structure and use CSS
>>for the style, your precious attributes are deprecated. What you
>>describe is pre-4.01, like 4.0 and 3.2.
>
>
>You could very well be right. The one book that I have on html is
>titled "HTML 4.01 Weekend Crash Course", and what I do is based on
>that book. I assumed that the information in the book is all 4.01.
>If it's not, I wouldn't know the difference.
>
>I'm not sure what you mean by "your precious attributes are
>deprecated".

It sounds like 'HTML 4.01 Weekend Crash Course' wasn't worth whatever
you paid for it. Deprecated are legacy or proprietary elements or
attributes ear-marked for phasing out and their uses is discouraged. If
you use 4.01 strict doctype your code will not validate. A good place to
start:



You say the book wasn't worth whatever I paid for it. Yet, after
about an hour's reading I'm doing what I want to do. That makes it
worth the money as far as I'm concerned.

I'd be willing to listen if someone would just provide some "why"s. I
knew when I came to this group about what kind of comments I'd get.
I've been here before and I've lurked at bit.
Ok I will give you an example, to illustrate the advantage of separating
your content for styling. A very plausible real-world example. you have
a large table with real tabular data, statistics and you decide to make
all the table headings white on black and bold text and the data cells
black on white. Also your page uses a serif font but you want your table
in sans serif, for this example I’ll say Arial.
In deprecated elements and attributes each table heading:
<tr>
<th bgcolor="black"><font face="arial" color="white">foo<font></th>
<th bgcolor="black"><font face="arial" color="white">bar<font></th>
...
</tr>
then your data
<tr>
<td><font face="arial">foo data<font></td>
<td><font face="arial">bar data<font></td>
...
</tr>
Now with 4.01 ands CSS
Style:
TABLE { font-family: arial, sans-serif; }
TH { color: white; blackground-color: black; }
TH { color: black; blackground-color: white; }
HTML:
<tr><th>foo</th><th>bar</th>...</tr>
<tr><td>foo data</td><td>bar data</td>...</tr>
Now remeber you have LOTS of headings and cells not just two here in the
snippet.
Now you get all done, you preview it and say to yourself, "Damn! I
cannot read it!" It looks really bad and you now want the headings not
white on black but dark red with pale gray background in a Courier,
monospaced font like an old MS Office doc example! Think about how much
editing it will take in the first example in deprecated elements and
attributes. With the second you leave the HTML alone and just change the CSS
TABLE { font-family: courier, monospaced; }
TH { color: maroon; blackground-color: silver; }
TH { color: black; blackground-color: white; }
You are all done. That alone should sell you on the concept.
--
Take care,
Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
www.LittleWorksStudio.com
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Re:HTML textbook recommendations

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:29:49 GMT, "Jonathan N. Little"
<lws4art@centralva.net>wrote:
(snipped well-explained illustration)
Quote
You are all done. That alone should sell you on the concept.
Gotcha. The nutshell summary is that when working up long and complex
sites, CSS allows you to group styles and make changes in one place
rather than having to make changes at every instance of the style.
Right?
That's a good point for the person that is now, or might be in the
future, creating large and complex sites.
In my case, I see it as a good reason to prepare myself for something
I might want to do in the future. My enthusiasm, though, is a bit low
since I can't think of anything large and complex that I want to
present.
I do appreciate the information, though.
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Re:HTML textbook recommendations

Tony Cooper wrote:
Quote
On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:29:49 GMT, "Jonathan N. Little"
<lws4art@centralva.net>wrote:


(snipped well-explained illustration)


Quote
You are all done. That alone should sell you on the concept.


Gotcha. The nutshell summary is that when working up long and complex
sites, CSS allows you to group styles and make changes in one place
rather than having to make changes at every instance of the style.
Right?

That's a good point for the person that is now, or might be in the
future, creating large and complex sites.

In my case, I see it as a good reason to prepare myself for something
I might want to do in the future. My enthusiasm, though, is a bit low
since I can't think of anything large and complex that I want to
present.

I do appreciate the information, though.


Well actually it can be quite helpful for more modest endevors like your
personal page. Use HTML only for your content and structure so that you
can focus on spelling, grammer and stuff. Have your strucure so that say
you use a DIV to contain and associate related bits like thoses
captions and descriptions for images.
<div class="snapshots">
<img>
<div class="caption">...</div>
<div class="aboutit">
<p>stuff...</p>
<p>More stuff</p>
</div>
</div>
Then later you can use CSS to decide whether the picture captions should
be big or small, or if you want the images on top and the description
text below, or maybe images to left and text to the left! You can do it
without changing and of the HTML.
BUT, if you put the works in a table and you have the image in one cell
and the text in another cell in the same row and to the left then your
only option to change the layout is to put the text to the left or below
is change all the HTML. Something we were unable to convey to someone
else in a very protracted thread...
--
Take care,
Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
www.LittleWorksStudio.com
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Re:HTML textbook recommendations

Tony Cooper wrote:
Quote
You shouldn't blame the book. It was copyrighted in 2000 and was
probably current at that time.
The HTML 4.01 Strict recommendation was published in 1999. It is largely
the same as HTML 4.0, which was published in 1998. CSS 2.0 was published
in 1998.
--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
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Re:HTML textbook recommendations

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 15:36:50 GMT, "Jonathan N. Little"
<lws4art@centralva.net>wrote:
Quote
Well actually it can be quite helpful for more modest endevors like your
personal page. Use HTML only for your content and structure so that you
can focus on spelling, grammer and stuff. Have your strucure so that say
you use a DIV to contain and associate related bits like thoses
captions and descriptions for images.
Thanks for the comments. I'm going to bow out of this now. My son's
in-laws are in the country for a visit, and I won't have time to do
anything in this area. However, I've borrowed a book on CSS and I'll
see if I can wade through it when the press of driving tourists around
lessens.
--
Tony Cooper
Orlando, FL
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