Your Help, and Especially Your Patience

HTML & CSS
21

I prefer plain code pieces but chocolate coated could be interesting; maybe I should write it on rice paper…

Anyway, I do have a very old example about 10-years old under the “XHTML Elements” on my abandoned website. Hideously ugly and not that well marked up - as it hasn’t been touched for 10-years - but maybe slightly useful once you remove the background image.

I think Barnum, they’ve been teaching you (or what you have learnt) from looking at your website is a handful HTML Elements, for example: H1, P, BR, IMG, A, CENTER, B, I, TABLE, TR, TD and FONT and you have learnt how to align them with [align=“”] and how to hardcode colours.

It kind of reminds me of the types of “trial-and-error” things I did at the very beginning… Your largest step will be trying to move onto CSS for applying styles and ditching the deprecated FONT tag. Because the code is littered with them and although they are easy to learn they are time-consuming to manage or type.

Are you just using notepad and hand-rolling the HTML, or using a web-editor?

On your first page the <style> block should be nested within the <head> element.

Erm, I don’t know the best way to approach this I could highlight the HTML issues or just wait to see at what stage you are at now.

I know it can be very disconcerting when crazies like myself say things like; “This, would be more semantic or just use CSS to style all the headings to white, and links to green, etc”.

Would you find it helpful if somebody showed you the ‘index’ page but replaced with very basic CSS; swapping CSS for the main presentational/tags attributes of the HTML, i.e. bgcolor, color and align?

Nice photographs and don’t give up hope… I was where you were several year back so keep asking questions. :slight_smile:

22

I actually can’t get past the first page of the photo site. It seems my browser needs to do some meta forward or something… prolly would work on Chrome if I tried it, though.

I like Robert’s idea of a sort of basic dummy HTML template with some CSS you can look at to see what it’s doing, and why, and how, and to get the feel of proper HTML. I did keep going back to the HTML Utopia book as a how-to-write-a-table because I had never written tables before and I remembered there had been an example in that book. It’s pretty normal to forget what you’ve learned just the other day, so keep examples sitting around where you work to look back at.

It helped me a lot that I was working on learning HTML/CSS every workday (that I’m sure makes a huge difference!) rather than hobbying on it a few nights a week (like I’m doing with the Horn right now… every time I play it sounds terrible because I’m not playing enough to get a decent tone going).

23

I always found trial and error the best method. There’s nothing like playing round with code and seeing what happens in the browser window. For the people who don’t learn well with books and prefer a more practical guide, I tend to direct them to a cheat sheet for HTML and CSS (which lists all the tags, attributes, properties, values, etc) and then I advise them to try everything out at least once… every tag, every css property… mix them up, compare them (etc). :slight_smile:

24

I first started learning HTML over 10 years ago. I had a site on AOL Hometown and used HotDog express to create a few pages. (I tried FrontPage but found it too complex). I wanted to modify a few things so I hacked the generated code. Lots of inline styles, some inline javascript, (now) deprecated tags, nested tables for layout. It wasn’t too bad for only a few pages, but OMG what a nightmare once the number of pages grew. As the amount of work increased every time I wanted to make a change, I kept thinking there had to be a better way. Then I found “includes”, then separation of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, external files. What a relief! Instead of spending hours doing tedious edits I can concentrate on doing more important stuff. Not really less work (I do more stuff now), but much more efficient use of my time.

And don’t think 10+ years makes me an expert, I’m still learning and hopefully getting better all the time.

25

It’s all about working smarter, not harder. Mitt, my first site was on AOL’s Hometown, and I used editors like Arachnophilia and HomeSite (a great tool). I did the same thing, hacked the generated code, went, “Whaaaaaa…?” and started digging into it. FrontPage code still gives me the hives. :slight_smile: