Web authoring and surfing

Documents about the WWW written or recommended by Jukka Korpela. Table of content:

• Essential Web authoring
• More about Web authoring
  • Web authoring in general
  • Character problems in Web authoring
  • Style sheets
  • Other important special topics
  • Tools for Web authors
  • Other authoring issues
  • Server issues
• Surfing, browser usage
• Links
• Sketches
• Old stuff (on a separate page).

Essential Web authoring material by me

To anyone interested in starting to create Web pages, I suggest the following meal:

cool appetizer:	So you want to create a home page?
starter soup:	Getting Started with HTML
main dish:	Learning HTML 3.2 by Examples (see separate short description of its ingredients).

According to good hypertext habits, the main dish contains suggestions for cheese and desserts, i.e. links to further reading. However, my HTML 3.2 material is fairly old, so you might find links below more useful.

Other documents about Web authoring by me

Web authoring in general

• Getting started with practical web accessibility
• Guide to Web Accessibility and Design for All (archive copy)
• Breaking the barriers: digital accessibility; a conference presentation that summarizes experiences of web accessibility policies
• Publishing on the Web Is Different
• How to use images in communication in general and on the Web in particular
• Augmentative authoring - a different look at "graceful degradation" in Web authoring
• Programs vs. markup, or why HTML authoring is not programming
• Links Want To Be Links; also published as an article with more stylish appearance at irt.org
• Why "Click here" is bad linking practice
• "Back to Top" links considered harmful
• Copyright basics for Web authors and users
• Techniques for multilingual Web sites; see also related notes in an interview, Yuccarama, at NUblog
• On multilingual Web sites and CSS
• HTML authoring in different languages - a link list, and in particular Web authoring in French
• HTML in retrospect - what can we learn from the great success, and the great failure?

Character problems in Web authoring

• A tutorial on character code issues--a relatively extensive general tutorial on character repertoires, codes, encodings, fonts, glyphs, MIME etc.
• Using national and special characters in HTML--a much shorter document especially for HTML authors (you may need to consult the tutorial for background, though)
• "Character references" explained
• Tables of character entity references in HTML 4 (α and things like that)
• How to find an &#number; notation for a character
• On the use of some MS Windows characters in HTML--problems with em dash, en dash, "smart quotes", etc.
• The euro sign in HTML
• The reverse solidus (backslash, \) in Web authoring
• The ISO Latin 1 character repertoire - a description with usage notes-- this hopefully helps HTML authors to use characters consistently
• Word division in Internet Explorer and preventing that with nobr
• gwrite - a virtual keyboard program; a simple JavaScript-based utility for typing Unicode characters
• a short character test for Web browsers
• Character encodings in Nvu

Style sheets

• CSS Caveats (new edition)
• Why style sheets are harmful
• Lurching Toward Babel: HTML, CSS, and XML (published in the July 1998 issue of Computer)
• How to write style sheets (procedural suggestions)
• Simple CSS demo #1: Setting font properties in a table
• Page layout using CSS: a very simple example
• Spacing of characters using CSS
• Mapping presentational HTML to CSS
• Preventing uneven linespacing on web pages
• Image tips for links using CSS

Other important special topics

• What happens in Quirks Mode in web browsers?
• How to write HTML forms - an annotated list of links to tutorials, references, and some special material by me (such as Choices in HTML forms)
• HTML tables; a very short introduction, and annotated links to tutorials and references, and specialized documents like How can I make just one cell in an HTML table bordered, or just one side of a cell bordered?
• Math in HTML (and CSS): how to present mathematical symbols and formulas
• Guidelines on alt texts in img elements; also lists a few good reasons to include ALT texts for every image
• Affecting the appearance of ALT texts for IMG elements
• Tooltips and alt texts for image maps
• Image captions on Web pages – HTML and CSS techniques
• Accessible org charts on web pages
• Using inline frames (iframe elements) to embed documents into HTML documents
• Marginal issues in Web page design; about setting Web page margins to zero, or to some other specific values
• How do I justify text on both sides on Web pages?
• Definition: a definition and an analysis (theoretical, with some implications on HTML authoring)
• Writing block quotations - why the HTML blockquote element is insufficient.
• Markup for addresses in HTML
• Explaining abbreviations, acronyms and symbols on Web pages
• Emphasis in HTML: em, strong, and de-emphasis
• Removing visual effects on request using DHTML

Tools for Web authors

• Allowed nesting of elements in HTML 4 (and XHTML 1.0)
• Quick index to HTML 4 specification
• How to access the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html (ciwah) newsgroup (and alt.html)
• A color chart, perhaps useful for selecting text or background color
• Windows default fonts - lists the fonts available on Windows 3.x, 95, 98, NT by default
• Using a C preprocessor as an HTML authoring tool
• Test display of HTML elements (mainly for testing the effect of user style sheets)
• Notes on some tools for checking and improving Web page accessibility (Bobby and A-Prompt)
• Test page for estimating the relative x-height
• These are links to documents for testing search engine behavior: SE test and SE test 2

Other authoring issues

• My comments on the HTML 4.0 draft (old, but the criticism still applies)
• Which HTML 3.2 constructs are not allowed in HTML 4.0?
• "HTML validation" is a good tool, but just a tool. A review of what validation is and why it might be useful, and why it might not.
• Creating your own DTD for HTML validation
• HTML 4.01 Strict DTD with comments removed, and a modified HTML 4.01 Strict DTD (with some XHTML style restrictions and with NOBR and WBR added); could be useful if you wish to create a modified HTML DTD of your own
• Why attribute values should always be quoted in HTML, or the saga of the slashed validators
• Empty elements in SGML, HTML, XML, and XHTML
• Footnotes (and endnotes) on Web pages
• An experimental hypertext version of RFC 2396, to study how RFCs might perhaps be made more useable in hypertext format. (The sample RFC is about URI, a generalization of URL, so it should be of some interest to Web authors due to its content. too.)
• XHTML 3.0 announced! (2003-04-01)

Server issues

• Quick reference to HTTP headers
• Customized 404 messages, especially on Apache (and a few notes about other error codes)
• Language negotiation and settings in a server (with Apache as example) (part of Techniques for multilingual Web sites).

Surfing, browser usage

• Language settings in browsers (part of Techniques for multilingual Web sites).
• Media type (MIME type) settings in your browser. Useful to Netscape and Opera users, not to IE users.
• Links to free viewers for MS Word, Excel, etc.
• Customized browsing on IE: a proof of a concept

Some of my favorite links about the Web

I really think people should keep their personal link lists (hotlists) for their personal use only. But here I will create a semi-personal collection of links to other people's documents. If you like my documents, the odds are that you'll like these too (the reverse might not be true!). Note: see also section Additional sources of information in my Learning HTML 3.2 by Examples.

• HTML 4 specification, CSS2 specification, Web content accessibility guidelines, and other W3C recommendations
• Web Authoring FAQ, HTML 4.0 Reference, Guide to Cascading Style Sheets, and other material by WDG
• HTML 4.0 in Netscape and Explorer (a good survey of Netscape 4.0 and IE 4.0 as compared with HTML 4.0, but also good points on HTML in general; but see my margin notes to it). See also Internet Explorer 5.0: With Style, Finally? from the same author.
• Robin's HTML 4.0 Conformance Test. A newer review of browsers' (lack of) support to HTML 4.
• Jakob Nielsen's alertboxes, such as Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design, "Top Ten Mistakes" revisited and Top Ten New Mistakes as well as Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management
• Dmitry's design lab (hosted by WebReference)
• Top Ten HTML Extensions That Did Not Make it Into Netscape 1.0 (fun)
• A Web Site is a Harsh Mistress (thought-giving)
• 4 Reasons to Validate your HTML (namely Netscape 1, Netscape 2, Netscape 3, Netscape 4!)
• Dan's Web Tips; excellent essays with sound technical advice
• HotSource HTML Help; discusses many other aspects of Web authoring too, not just HTML; contains a concise "Unofficial" Official alt.html FAQ; there's a newer alt.html FAQ based on it, by Isofarro
• HTML with Style; contains an expanding series of enjoyable tutorials
• Web Design Hints and Tips by Paul Rundle, Pankaj Kamthan and Martin Webb; a sane overview on using advanced technologies on Web pages in a useful way. "A wiki experiment in community website collaboration on HTML, CSS, PHP, CGI, Perl, mySQL, XML, JavaScript, etc." All my FAQs, originally "A wiki experiment in community website collaboration on HTML, CSS, PHP, CGI, Perl, mySQL, XML, JavaScript, etc.", now with content more or less frozen

Sketches

I have worked on the problems of translation-friendly authoring.

I do not consider writing an HTML 4.0 update of my famous Learning HTML 3.2 by Examples. Notice that WDG has produced a very good HTML 4.0 Reference.

Miscellaneous, partly very sketchy documents:

• My old raw ideas on HMM, HyperMedia Markup language, a son of HTML.
• A sketchy description of the proposed OBJECT element (quite incomplete).
• Notes on problems of designing and maintaining large Web documents.
• The "general" document type definition presented in an annex of the SGML standard.
• A proposal: Universal Text Data format (UTD); a detailed futuristic suggestion on what really structured documents with general semantics could be.

Old stuff

Old stuff (which has historical interest only, at most) has been moved to a separate page.