Resources for Web Workers

HTML

You should learn it.

As long as you don't know HTML, you're stuck at a level where you can't fix things that are broken on your Web pages. You see things on other people's pages that you would like to do, but you can't figure out how. Your skills are weak if you don't know HTML.

The basic tags you should know by heart:

<html> </html>
<head> </head>
<title> </title>
<body> </body>
<p> </p>
<img src=""> *
<a href=""> </a>

* If you're using XHTML, make that <img src="" />

You should also understand how the table tags work:

<table> </table>
<tr> </tr>
<td> </td>

Look, it's only 10 pairs of tags. You can't learn 10 pairs of tags? Sheesh. In that case, just forget about designing for the Web. You don't have the energy for it.

The Holzschlag book (see the Books page) is my No. 1 recommendation for learning HTML today. Start at the beginning. Read it straight through. It won't take long.

Lists in HTML

HTML has three kinds of lists for your designing pleasure:

Unordered <ul> </ul>
Ordered <ol> </ol>
Definition <dl> </dl>

That one is an unordered list, commonly called a bulleted list everywhere outside HTML (that is, in print). I used CSS to get the square-shaped bullets.

Below is an ordered list, which some people may call a numbered list.

Unordered <ul> </ul>
Ordered <ol> </ol>
Definition <dl> </dl>

Definition lists are very cool, but require a little more work. They usually look like this:

Unordered: Each list item <li> begins with a bullet.
Ordered: Each list item <li> begins with a numeral.
Definition: Instead of list items, we have term <dt> and definition <dd>. The definition is indented automatically.

More Tags

Headings in HTML are structural, not design elements. That means you should NOT use the heading tags to make normal text look big and bold. Use CSS for design and HTML for structure. Heading tags should be used only with real headings that designate sections of the document.

There are six levels of heading, with <h1> being primary or most important, <h2> being secondary, etc., on down to little old <h6>. The heading tags come in pairs:

<h1> </h1>
<h2> </h2>
Etc.

Another common and useful tag is the line break:

<br> **

** If you're using XHTML, make that <br />

This tag is intended to create a line ending in text such as poetry or street addresses:

Mary Smith
123 W. Main St.
Anytown, Fla. 32611

The <br> tag should NEVER be used to add extra space between lines. That should be done with CSS instead.

In Conclusion

If this doesn't seem like much, you're right -- it isn't. Anyone can learn HTML in a few hours at the most. So, what's stopping you?

The next step AFTER you learn HTML is to start learning CSS. That takes a little longer. But with CSS, you are able to control the design of your Web pages.

Definitive Sources

And one more thing: An excellent article that explains (in more detail than you probably need) the use of the DOCTYPE declaration. You need to use it. You might as well learn how.

If you just want to cut to the chase with DOCTYPE, here it is:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Don't forget to use the correct <html> tag attributes with that: