Perception is partial reality: April 2006

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Web page structure - the beginning.

Here's how it all begins. Once you have chosen a DTD (document type definition), you will add several things called tags to your page to layout the page for you to begin inserting html or xhtml code giving your page a distinct look.

Let's build from the last post. I am going to use notepad for this demonstration, but remember, any text editor that doesn't insert any special formatting codes will work.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

<head>

 <title>Insert your page title here</title>
 <meta http-equiv="content-type" 
  content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
</head>

<body>

     <p>---Create Your Page In This Area---</p>

</body>
</html>

Where the <p> tag is used above, can also be used a <div> tag. I try to use <div> tags wherever possible for page layout and design.

Saturday, April 15, 2006

XHTML - Where to begin.

When you're creating a web page, one of the easiest ways to create a lean and clean set of xhtml code is to begin with your "doctype". The doctype declares to the reading browser (the browser you are using to view your pages) what to expect and how to interpret it. So, if you don't tell the browser anything at all, it reads everything in what is called "quirks" mode, which may or may not display your pages as intended. Bottom line - always use a doctype. And why xhtml? Because it is where everything is going or has gone. There are some basics you should know about xhtml, so you may wish to visit the w3schools site, which will provide you with all and more than you ever wanted to know about xhtml, css, and html.

I typically use the transitional form of the doctype, as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html 
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

For more information on choosing a doctype, follow the links below:
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/doctype.html

http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html

After choosing a doctype, open your favorite text editor and insert it as the first line. Be sure you are not using an editor that may insert its own code after saving the file and when you do save the file, choose "save as..." and create a name of your choosing and extend it with .html, i.e., your_filename.html.

CSS, XHTML, and how it all started for me.

For years I envied web pages and especially personal ones. I wanted to create my own, but was always too busy to even fathom where to begin. Up until the last six to nine months, I knew little if anything about creating a web page. Now, I have a simple web page I created with the help of Macromedia Studio 8, a lot of reading, tutorials, and more reading. I haven't finished all the books I bought. Most of the help I've gotten are from reading pages and pages of blogs and help sites for web design. The web has proven to be an invaluable resource which jumpstarted me to where I am now.

Like so many others out there, I want to write a few pages, at least, about web design to help you jumpstart your design ideas. One thing I know for sure, most of the design it with your creative talent. If you don't think you're creative, just try a few things with some code from already created pages and soon you'll come up with your own ideas to implement.

Stay tuned for some real basics on where to begin.

New beginnings

Maybe I'll actually do a little something with this new blog. For some reason "blogger.com" has managed to evade my spurious web surfing. It looks cool and a blogring over at Xanga brought me here. I signed up for an HTML, XHTML, & CSS blog on Xanga and one of the users, who hasn't posted anything since 2004, commented Xanga didn't give enough flexibility to allow full use of XHTML. I've found XHTML use with Xanga is relative to the use of div tags and inserting the proper header information, i.e., inputting your own header. I'll write more later. Stay tuned.