This is a practical guide to some advanced, but still not
terribly complicated, HTML features that can be used to create Web pages
with only a word processor (and occasionally some readily available free-
or shareware). Some of these techniques require enough tedious tagging that
you might want to use an HTML editor to accomplish them, but you don't have
to. Here is some information (and some opinions) on
HTML editors.
In deciding what topics to include in this guide, and at what level to explain
them, I am assuming that you have a familiarity at least with the topics
covered in my basic HTML guide: Quick and Painless
HTML. I do a great deal more referring to other sources in this guide
than in the previous one, because some of these topics and techniques are
not as familiar to me as basic HTML, and I therefore don't feel qualified
to go into the level of detail that some readers might want. Fortunately,
there are many wonderful explanatory sites, tutorials and other resources
on the Web. After the table of contents below, I have
compiled a complete list of these references from throughout
the guide, as well as some general sources. Use them to get more information
on the topics covered here, although if you contact me
with questions I'll do my best to help.
A couple of notes on terminology and punctuation:
Terms used often in this guide that might not be familiar to readers are "element," "attribute" and "value." They refer
to basic HTML tags and supplemental commands added to them. For example,
in the expression <body bgcolor="yellow"> the element is body, the attribute is bgcolor and its value is yellow. The allowable attributes that may follow each HTML element
can be found in lists of these elements, or in HTML specification lists.
There are links to many lists of this kind in the references below. Or, of
course, you can learn how to use attributes by studying the source code of
existing web pages.
Quotes were not always needed around the values for some
attributes, and so web browsers will usually display your pages correctly
without them. Current web standards, however, require quotes for all values
(even numbers and percents), so you need to enclose
attributes within quotes in all cases, and I have tried to do so in all of my examples. (For more information on standards, see this note.)
Note: these are definitely not all of the good sites available on these topics.
(Can anyone really claim to have a comprehensive list of Web sources
on any subject?) But they are the ones I have stumbled across one
way or another and have found to be very useful. I hope this listing is helpful
to you.
In addition to these Web sources, I have also found these books (yes, print
on paper) very useful: Web Design in a Nutshell, by Jennifer
Niederst (Blume Library call number: TK 5105.888 N542 1999) and How to Set Up and Maintain a Web Site, by Lincoln Stein. (Blume
Library call number: TK 5105.888 .S74 1997.) Another good book is Using HTML 4, by Mark Brown and Jerry Honeycutt. The library
has an earlier edition, which is still useful for basic features: Using
HTML, at QA 76.76 H95 R25 1996.
IMPORTANT NOTE: All of the instructions in this and my other tutorials
apply to authoring for the Web at present (mid-2007) and will continue
to be useful into the future. But to be sure you are using the latest standards, especially as we get further from 2007, you can always check with the good folks at W3Schools.
Intermediate HTML
