More Advanced Web Concepts
Now you can do basic text formatting (with in-line images) and you know
how to add links to your pages, but still you wonder
How does the Webmaster at www.widgets.com
get all
those way cool effects on his Web pages? And are they
really what makes a document good? Hmm...
Here are some brief answers to these questions:
More HTML Features
- Forms
- There's a
simple form on these course pages, but they can be
more complicated, like
this one on the Engineering Science pages. Good introductions
to forms are
Mosaic for X version 2.0 Fill-Out Form Support at NCSA and
Instantaneous Introduction to HTML Forms from U. Kansas
- Clickable image maps
- These allow you to create images that look like buttons or maps with
links to other documents which depend on where in the image you click.
The Computer Science page
has one, as does
the Global Network Navigator page
(and so do lots of others). Setting these up is covered in any of
the more advanced HTML guides.
Features of HTML Dialects
Lots of the fashionable new features are not officially a part of HTML at
all, but are nonetheless supported by some or all browsers. Basically,
there are two main "dialects" of enhanced HTML developing in parallel:
- HTML 3
- The "official" next version of HTML (the current version is 2), HTML 3
includes support for forms, centering, tables, figures, lists with
graphical "bullets", equations, and more. Good references on HTML
and all its dialects can be found from
the W3 consortium's HTML page.
- HTML with the "Netscape enhancements"
- Pushed by the friendly folks who brought you the Netscape browser,
this contains some of the same features as HTML 3 and some others
(like the
blink
tag) which aren't in HTML 3.
Unfortunately, it also does some of the same things in
different ways (like centering). You can find more information
through Netscape's help buttons or, better yet, read
this nice tutorial from MIT.
Even though you can do lots of desirable things with either or a combination
of these dialects, neither of them is official, and nobody knows
what will be official, say, one or two years from now.
The point: Relying heavily on these features will make your
pages "cooler", but harder to maintain as the language evolves.
Web Authoring Style
Once you've got the mechanics of HTML down, you can find plenty of people on
the Web who would like to tell you how your document "should" look and
whether all those fancy HTML features you used have really improved your
documents.
It's a good idea to take a look at a few "style guides", for example:
Author:
Jim McDonald
<jim@engr.trinity.edu>
Last modified: Fri Sep 29 13:14:57 CDT 1995