Advantages and Disadvantages of Frames
To use Frames or not to use Frames... That is the question... I've kept away from using frames in any of my work where possible. As much as I like some of the features that frames offer, such as a static header area and side menu bar, there is...
Anti-Spam Two Step for Webmasters
If your email address is on a website that's been online for a while you're being blasted with unsolicited email (SPAM). You can delete it or you can eliminate much of it in two simple steps. Step 1: Scramble Your Email Address It isn't human...
PIM Team Case Study: Creating Text Effects With PHP and GD
See how you can create graphic effects on text with PHP and GD - drop shadows, arcs, fonts and colors.
Problem
A-tec Signs and Sraphics Inc. launched a web site with the idea to sell decals online. To achieve better customers ineterest...
Some Ways To Improve Your King Content
There are thousands of articles, books and forum posts which showed that content is king in search engine optimization (SEO). In this article, you can find some ways that can help you improve this king content for your web site.
* Content for...
Website Optimization - A SEO Specialist Reveals All
Website optimization is the first step in promoting your
website. Those with foresight and deeper pockets will have a
SEO-savvy webmaster (such as myself) build the website that is
optimized from the start. Otherwise, a website may need...
Understanding HTML
HTML is a relatively simple language, in some places it is
almost completely readable and understandable but that doesn't
stop people from having problems with it. Why is that? It's
mainly because, while the HTML tags themselves are easy,
creating an HTML document that works as intended on a web server
requires you to know a few extra things that aren't often
explained. Here, then, is a quick guide to understanding those
parts of HTML that they just don't tell you about in the books.
It is meant to work as a check-list for those writing HTML
documents - perhaps with emphasis on all those doing it for the
first time.
Understand Doctypes.
It isn't often noted that valid HMTL documents don't actually
start with the tag - they have one extra tag before it.
This is the doctype, and it must be present right at the top of
your document for it to be valid HTML.
There are only really two doctypes that you really need to know
about. The HTML4 doctype looks like this:
These versions of the doctypes that are a little more forgiving
- if you're a purist, you can use the strict ones instead by
changing the words 'transitional' and 'loose' to 'strict'.
But what is the doctype for? Well, its purpose is simple enough:
it tells web browsers exactly what version of HTML your page was
written in, to help them to interpret it correctly.
Understand HTTP Errors.
A truly shocking number of people writing HTML pages don't know
how HTTP works - and they quickly run into trouble because of
it. HTTP is the way a web browser communicates with a web
server, and this communication includes information about your
pages, such as cookies.
You don't need to worry too much about the internals of HTTP,
but it's worth knowing that it works by the browser sending a
request to the server for a certain page, and the server then
responding with a code.
Your website should be set up to handle error codes well. For
example, a 404 (page not found) error should show a page with
links to the most useful parts of your site. Other common error
codes include:
MIME types are another part of the HTML header - an important
one. Also known as the content-type header, they tell the
browser what kind of file they are about to send. Browsers don't
rely on HTML files ending in .html, JPEG images ending in .jpeg,
and so on: they rely on the content-type header. If you don't
know about this, you can have problems if you need to configure
your server to send anything unusual.
Here are some common MIME types:
text/html - HTML.
text/css - CSS
text/plain - plain text.
image/gif - GIF image.
image/jpeg - JPEG image.
image/png - PNG image.
audio/mpeg - MP3 audio file.
application/x-shockwave-flash - Flash movie.
Understand Link Paths.
One of the hardest things to understand about HTML is all the
different things that you can put in an 'href' property.
Abbreviated URLs are created using the rules of old text-based
operating systems, and there are plenty of people writing HTML
today who are completely unfamiliar with these rules.
To put it simply, one dot means "in the folder we're in now",
while two dots means "in the folder above the one we're in now".
This can get confusing fast - just look at the difference one
dot can make! Be careful with it.
Understand How to Insert Things That Aren't HTML.
One of the most common HTML questions is how to insert things
like Javascript and CSS into an HTML document. This is one of
the easiest questions to answer: you simply use the link and
script tags, like this:
