In order to complete what I said earlier about web page development, let me
add what I had intended to say in my first posting. There are three items
that I wish to somewhat modify:
The first is that when lifting the HTML code from a remote web site, you
don't have to "scrape" the entire screen with the I-bar. Rather, use
Control-A to "select all" before you Control-C ("copy selected text to
clipboard"). You only need the I-bar scraper if you are lifting a part of the
code. I mention all of this because these editing features are hidden (or at
least not explained) in the Netscape source code window. (BTW, the Control-
type commands are borrowed directly from the Macintosh -- and are ancient
there -- but they are now beginning to become almost as uniform on new
PC-based software as they were on the Mac. Almost all of Microsoft's newer
products use these sequences, and that actually helps bring the same
uniformity of use that was always characteristic of the Macintosh and made it
such a pleasure to use).
The second item is my recommendation for looking at the source for our web
page. I mention that because you can see reasonably elaborate pages that are
completely hand-assembled. That hand-assembly aspect will be particularly
clear once you view the source code because of the non-uniform lengths of the
individual lines of text. As the content of the text is modified through
revision, the lines are made shorter or longer as necessary. But it doesn't
matter to HTML. And editing the text content of a web page in this manner is
no more difficult than creating and editing an e-mail message.
[A note about HTML: a line break (a carriage return) is handled as a space in
HTML -- and multiple spaces, should they be found in the text -- are
automatically reduced to a single space, thus the various line lengths are
irrelevant to HTML. If you wish multiple spaces to appear in your text, you
must use the sequence,  , a non-reducible space (information which will
appear in the Beginner's Guide to HTML that I earlier referenced). To
end/begin a new paragraph, you use the <p> tag. To cause a line to break, you
use <br>. Capitalization within the tags is generally irrelevant to HTML.]
After you've looked at the source for our web page, go look at as many others
as you care to, especially the ones that you find attractive. It will be easy
to see that most pages are machine-generated -- simply because of the uniform
line lengths and the appearance of some semi-automated annonations that
appear throughout the code. But all of this doesn't make difference to the
HTML interpreters that appear in the various browsers. The web pages,
hand-assembled or automatically assembled, will look the same on the CRT's
screen if your code is the same.
The third item that I wish to elaborate on is that you can't trust a web page
that is only viewed during its development with one browser. I now believe
that it is imperative to gather up at least three browsers: Netscape, IE, and
AOL to see how they each individually render your web page. There will be
differences -- some of which may be occasionally very large indeed. But, with
experimentation, you can generate code that is acceptable to all three and
which will be rendered essentially identically.
And, finally, you must decide what minimum level of HTML you are going to
support. We have standardized on HTML 2.0, which is now reliably supported by
Netscape 3.0, IE 3.0, and AOL 3.0. We decided early on -- as has almost every
other commercial web site -- not to bother with text-only browsers such as
Lynx.
Again, best of luck,
Wirt Atmar
|
