Ask Felgall
Forum
GlossaryHyperText Markup Language Help
We now have Package Deals to create and maintain your website for you.
(includes special prices for community groups and hobby clubs)
- XHTML 1.0 Reference
A series of pages that describe what tags and tag attributes are available in XHTML1.0 and 1.1.
- XHTML 1.0 Tutorials
A series of pages that introduce the beginner to writing their own XHTML 1.0 code.
- HTML Hints and Tips
Get the most out of your HTML coding.
- Solving Web Site Problems
Common problems that people have with web page creation and how to solve them.
- NVU Tutorials
How to set up and use this popular free web editor.
In addition to the coding solutions listed in this section, you will find some additional solutions offered on the Stylesheet, Javascript, and interactive web pages.
HTML is a defined subset of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) used specifically for web page development. My first exposure to markup languages was in the early eighties using a markup language called 'Script' to create documentation on the mainframe. The syntax is slightly different between Script and HTML (eg. <ol> instead of :ol and </ol> instead of :eol) but having already used Script made learning HTML easy.
HTML itself has changed and developed over the years. Version 3.2 was the standard for some time before being superseded by version 4 (which standardized many of the commands that the latest Explorer and Netscape browsers already understood). Now HTML is undergoing a further change to bring it into line with XML (another SGML subset designed to be much more flexible than just producing web pages). This change is called XHTML 1.0 and it is a document type defined within XML that allows a slight modification to the existing HTML 4.0 pages in order to create valid XML documents. Each of the pages on this site was created using XHTML coding and fed through W3C's validator in order to confirm that all of the code is valid. Documents correctly defined using XHTML are both valid XML documents and will display correctly in most recent browsers (and apart from displaying the XML declaration as text most earlier browsers can handle them as well).
There are a number of different browsers available that can be used to access your web pages. Each of these will render your page slightly (or greatly) differently from the others. To ensure that you develop web pages that display and are useable on as many as possible of the browsers that might be used to access your page requires some work. If you are doing significant web development then you ought to load at least the three most common web browsers onto your system and check out your web pages in each. The most common browsers are Internet Explorer, Netscape (now owned by AOL), Mozilla, and Opera. Each of these browsers is freely available and do not conflict with one another so there is no excuse. You should also take into account people browsing with images turned off, and browsers without Flash, Javascript, or Java support available so as to ensure that these users are still able to navigate your site and access at least most of the available information without requiring these features.
