At 07:59 AM 1/15/05 -0500, dhbailey wrote: >HTML isn't hard to figure out, there are some very helpful books which >make it much easier than it at first appears. I have gotten a lot of >mileage out of HTML for Dummies as a first book and am gradually delving >further. My web-site is functional but not fancy and certainly is not a >contender for any web-design awards other than boring, but it works, all >the links function and it works the same in Netscape and IE. Now in my >spare time I plan on fancying it up a bit, but still working hard to >keep it quick-loading and functional with a dial-up connection.
Hand-done can be very good. Though they are plain and content-based, all of my websites are hand-done in a little text editor called Webber (PC only) that highlights different tags in different colors. Otherwise, it's just an ASCII notepad. The largest of the sites is Kalvos & Damian (http://kalvos.org/), which contains over 8,000 documents. The design is very plain, but many of these pages date from 1995 and only occasionally needed fixing here & there (mostly the removal of design elements such as font sizes). In fact, in order to keep design out of the pages -- so they can be redesigned in one pass, and always at least display in all browsers -- I use simple stylesheets. Placement, font colors and sizes, shading, headlines, etc., are all done in a single accompanying stylesheet -- like HTML, writing a stylesheet (a short text document) can be learned in a few hours. And while Andrew is working, he should meet the World Wide Web Consortium or U.S. Section 508 accessibility guidelines (essentially the same), which means the site will work with speech and Braille readers and other accessibility and text browsers. No special coding is needed -- in fact, you need only correct coding and the avoidance of proprietary inaccessible techniques (such as Flash, Java, and Javascript) for essential components such as navigation. Supposed WYSIWYG web page editors do not provide resilient results. Even Dreamweaver (which I bought back in version 3, and later sold) tended to lean toward bloated, slow pages. Later versions apparently push all sorts of Macromedia widgets that don't work properly in all browsers, especially accessibility browsers. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
