HTML textbook recommendations

[Tony Cooper]

It sounds like 'HTML 4.01 Weekend Crash Course' wasn't worth whatever
you paid for it. Deprecated are legacy or proprietary elements or
attributes ear-marked for phasing out and their uses is discouraged. If
you use 4.01 strict doctype your code will not validate. A good place to
start:

You say the book wasn't worth whatever I paid for it. Yet, after
about an hour's reading I'm doing what I want to do. That makes it
worth the money as far as I'm concerned.

I'd be willing to listen if someone would just provide some "why"s. I
knew when I came to this group about what kind of comments I'd get.
I've been here before and I've lurked at bit.

The objections are that what I'm using is deprecated, discouraged, not
recommended, will not validate, not the current thing to do, and on
and on.

What is the problem, though? I'm putting pages that are up for a
month and up just to be seen by a small group of family members. The
pages that I put up load, show what I want to show, do what I want to
do, and take minutes to prepare.

No one, so far, has said "What you're doing is wrong because ...."
What's the downside?

Your site, Jonathan, (the link in your sig) is up there for a
completely different reason than my site. Your's is a permanent - or
as permanent as sites go - site that is intended to display and sell
your creations. Possibly you want it to come up search engines. It's
a business venture. For no other reason than that it should be done
using the most current techniques.

My site, though, is a link to some pictures of my family for other
members of my family. No one else, normally, ever sees it. It's a
temporary site with a planned lifespan of a mayfly. Since it will
down by November, why should I care if the attributes will be phased
out sometime in the future. Why should I care if it doesn't validate?
I don't want it found by search engines.

Stan says he doesn't mind his site having spelling and punctuation
errors because it's just a casual personal site. Yet, he objects to
my casual personal site being written in an outmoded style. Doesn't
make sense to me. His errors are visible, but mine are not unless you
peek at the source The people that I send links to don't look at the
source.

I really wish that someone here could provide a logical explanation
based on the "why"s and "because"s and geared to the specific intent
involved. Just tell me how
http://home.earthlink.net/~tony_cooper213/bluehome.html would
accomplish something if written in CSS with all of the latest bells
and whistles that it doesn't accomplish the way it is.

 

[Andy Dingley]

You say the book wasn't worth whatever I paid for it. Yet, after
about an hour's reading I'm doing what I want to do. That makes it
worth the money as far as I'm concerned.

If the page is "seen by half a dozen people and only up for a month",
then couldn't you just phone them up and _tell_ them what's on the
page?

The fallacy is to assume that pages really are "just up for a short
while" - they tend to stick around longer than you expect, the revised
"real" version never happens when it ought to, or Google finds it and
they're in the cache for ages afterwards, even after you've taken the
page down. It's a big web out there - stuff gets seen by more people
than you'd expect.

You should always write good, modern well-structured HTML 4.01 (at
least). It's _easier_ than the nasty old cruft of yesteryear and far
quicker. However this assumes that you know how to do that and the sad
fact is that most books and training are still very poor (Castro, Lie
& Bos, Raggett or Meyer are some of the very few worth reading). If
you've picked up a turkey of a book, then you have my sympathies - you
probably spent longer than was necessary on getting what you needed
done.

 

[Tony Cooper]

If the page is "seen by half a dozen people and only up for a month",
then couldn't you just phone them up and _tell_ them what's on the
page?

You do understand that this is a page of family photographs?
How do you "tell" people about photographs? Isn't the intent of
photographs to "show" them?

The fallacy is to assume that pages really are "just up for a short
while" - they tend to stick around longer than you expect, the revised
"real" version never happens when it ought to, or Google finds it and
they're in the cache for ages afterwards, even after you've taken the
page down. It's a big web out there - stuff gets seen by more people
than you'd expect.

OK, let's say that even though I remove the page next month, someone
finds my page of family photographs in six months and there are
errors. What's the problem?

You should always write good, modern well-structured HTML 4.01 (at
least). It's _easier_ than the nasty old cruft of yesteryear and far
quicker. However this assumes that you know how to do that and the sad
fact is that most books and training are still very poor (Castro, Lie
& Bos, Raggett or Meyer are some of the very few worth reading). If
you've picked up a turkey of a book, then you have my sympathies - you
probably spent longer than was necessary on getting what you needed
done.

You shouldn't blame the book. It was copyrighted in 2000 and was
probably current at that time. If there's blame, it should be that I
haven't bought a new book and started using what is in the new book.

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

You say the book wasn't worth whatever I paid for it. Yet, after
about an hour's reading I'm doing what I want to do. That makes it
worth the money as far as I'm concerned.

I'd be willing to listen if someone would just provide some "why"s. I
knew when I came to this group about what kind of comments I'd get.
I've been here before and I've lurked at bit.

Ok I will give you an example, to illustrate the advantage of separating
your content for styling. A very plausible real-world example. you have
a large table with real tabular data, statistics and you decide to make
all the table headings white on black and bold text and the data cells
black on white. Also your page uses a serif font but you want your table
in sans serif, for this example I’ll say Arial.

In deprecated elements and attributes each table heading:
<tr>
<th bgcolor="black"><font face="arial" color="white">foo<font></th>
<th bgcolor="black"><font face="arial" color="white">bar<font></th>
...
</tr>

then your data
<tr>
<td><font face="arial">foo data<font></td>
<td><font face="arial">bar data<font></td>
...
</tr>

Now with 4.01 ands CSS
Style:

TABLE { font-family: arial, sans-serif; }
TH { color: white; blackground-color: black; }
TH { color: black; blackground-color: white; }

HTML:

<tr><th>foo</th><th>bar</th>...</tr>
<tr><td>foo data</td><td>bar data</td>...</tr>

Now remeber you have LOTS of headings and cells not just two here in the
snippet.

Now you get all done, you preview it and say to yourself, "Damn! I
cannot read it!" It looks really bad and you now want the headings not
white on black but dark red with pale gray background in a Courier,
monospaced font like an old MS Office doc example! Think about how much
editing it will take in the first example in deprecated elements and
attributes. With the second you leave the HTML alone and just change the CSS

TABLE { font-family: courier, monospaced; }
TH { color: maroon; blackground-color: silver; }
TH { color: black; blackground-color: white; }

You are all done. That alone should sell you on the concept.

 

[Tony Cooper]

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:29:49 GMT, "Jonathan N. Little"


(snipped well-explained illustration)

You are all done. That alone should sell you on the concept.

Gotcha. The nutshell summary is that when working up long and complex
sites, CSS allows you to group styles and make changes in one place
rather than having to make changes at every instance of the style.
Right?

That's a good point for the person that is now, or might be in the
future, creating large and complex sites.

In my case, I see it as a good reason to prepare myself for something
I might want to do in the future. My enthusiasm, though, is a bit low
since I can't think of anything large and complex that I want to
present.

I do appreciate the information, though.

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:29:49 GMT, "Jonathan N. Little"


(snipped well-explained illustration)




Gotcha. The nutshell summary is that when working up long and complex
sites, CSS allows you to group styles and make changes in one place
rather than having to make changes at every instance of the style.
Right?

That's a good point for the person that is now, or might be in the
future, creating large and complex sites.

In my case, I see it as a good reason to prepare myself for something
I might want to do in the future. My enthusiasm, though, is a bit low
since I can't think of anything large and complex that I want to
present.

I do appreciate the information, though.

Well actually it can be quite helpful for more modest endevors like your
personal page. Use HTML only for your content and structure so that you
can focus on spelling, grammer and stuff. Have your strucure so that say
you use a DIV to contain and associate related bits like thoses
captions and descriptions for images.

<div class="snapshots">
<img>
<div class="caption">...</div>
<div class="aboutit">
<p>stuff...</p>
<p>More stuff</p>
</div>
</div>

Then later you can use CSS to decide whether the picture captions should
be big or small, or if you want the images on top and the description
text below, or maybe images to left and text to the left! You can do it
without changing and of the HTML.

BUT, if you put the works in a table and you have the image in one cell
and the text in another cell in the same row and to the left then your
only option to change the layout is to put the text to the left or below
is change all the HTML. Something we were unable to convey to someone
else in a very protracted thread...

 

[Toby Inkster]

You shouldn't blame the book. It was copyrighted in 2000 and was
probably current at that time.

The HTML 4.01 Strict recommendation was published in 1999. It is largely
the same as HTML 4.0, which was published in 1998. CSS 2.0 was published
in 1998.

 

[Tony Cooper]

Well actually it can be quite helpful for more modest endevors like your
personal page. Use HTML only for your content and structure so that you
can focus on spelling, grammer and stuff. Have your strucure so that say
you use a DIV to contain and associate related bits like thoses
captions and descriptions for images.

Thanks for the comments. I'm going to bow out of this now. My son's
in-laws are in the country for a visit, and I won't have time to do
anything in this area. However, I've borrowed a book on CSS and I'll
see if I can wade through it when the press of driving tourists around
lessens.