Today’s topic is more HTML, and a chance to work on your handcoded pages. For HTML5, look back at HTML & CSS Chapter 8 (p. 179-180) and Chapter 17. It is also introduced throughout the first nine chapters. This post at net tutorials is a good place for an overview.
Your assignment is to follow class instructions to create two pages using TextEdit or Notepad as described on the handcoded assignment.
- Continue with the hand-coded Web pages, being careful of spelling, noting all the required elements.
Check out these primers if you still need help:
Things to note/review about (X)HTML:
- Among many others, the HTMLDog is a good place to start and the How Stuff Works page explains, well, how HTML works.
- All closing tags e.g. <body> are closed with the tag plus a forward slash: </body>
- Never include attributes in the closing tag: it is </a> not </a href>
- Text inside the <title> </title> cannot be formatted
- If you use more than one attribute within a given tag you can close them all with one ending tag if that suits your design intent: <div id="fred" title="fred">Hello</div>
- It had become “tradition” to leave off some closing tags that strictly (XHTML) speaking should be there. Among those are </p>, </li>
- Similarly, it had become habit to leave off the ditto ("quotation marks") around values of an attribute. That will not cause problems if the value is a single word such as color=red or a number such as size=4. You must use " " for alt text, src= href= and any value that has more than one word/number. So to be XHTML-compliant, use them at all times, e.g.
< hr size="3" noshade="noshade" />
Again, for HTML5, you can decide to not close your tags of either type (empty or non-empty), use uppercase letters in tags, not quote values of attributes. I would not—there's no good reason not to stick to proper XHTML. As Tantek Çelik says, if you wanted to connect to other languages (e.g. AJAX) you'd need valid XHTML code. Plus it's required for assignments in this class, so that you know standards-based HTML when confronted with it.
- Finally, for future reference try The HTML Writers Guild site, and the official W3C site
And here's the second video—we'll take a look at a bit of it to show what Rich Text looks like in the browser, and how smart quotes affect the display:
Site maintained by John Beatty