[Novalug] HTML Primer for old html-ers??

contact@jlleblanc.com contact@jlleblanc.com
Wed Dec 26 13:40:03 EST 2007


I might be veering this off-topic, but this is the year I finally  
jumped on the semantic HTML bandwagon.

For the longest time, I knew a little bit of HTML and a little bit of  
CSS, but didn't really use them for much more than what I needed to do  
(I'm a programmer). Earlier this year, I heard about the jQuery  
Javascript framework and decided to take a look. jQuery uses CSS-style  
selectors to find HTML elements to modify/read/process. When I started  
using jQuery for all of my Javascript, "new wave" CSS and XHTML  
finally made sense to me in a BIG way.

I've used this CSS reference (  
http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/css_tutorial/index.html )  
in the past and found it to be helpful, scroll down for the TOC of the  
free version.

So long as you avoid presentational tags such as <font>, you should be  
in good shape as far as XHTML goes. If you want to apply a custom CSS  
based style, the <span> tag is supposed to give you a way of doing  
this without adding incidental styles. So <span>this</span> will do  
nothing on its own, but <span class="joestyle">this</span> will get  
the style from the "joestyle" class.

My biggest complaint with the "tableless layout" school of thought is  
that the alternatives are a bit more complicated than they should be.  
While using tables for layout is an abuse of the markup, it frequently  
does exactly what I want in a reliable fashion. This gripe aside, CSS  
has vastly improved the process of producing layouts that work  
*relatively* well across browsers.

Another thing you can do is take some of your current HTML pages and  
throw them into a validator. Start with HTML 4.01 Strict, the move to  
XHTML 1.0 Transitional, then XHTML 1.0 Strict, making changes along  
the way to get your pages to validate. This will help you get rid of  
old tags.

Hope this helps.

-Joe

Quoting greg pryzby <greg@pryzby.org>:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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>
> So when I write HTML I remember what I did 10 years (or maybe more) ago
> and pretty much use the same tages.
>
> Is there a primer anyone knows of that gives the basics of the new tags
> and how to use them? I guess CSS is part of the learning now (or I
> should say how the two are married).
>
> I look at the stuff and can figure it out, but I didn't know if there
> was a good reference I can use to 'update my knowledge'
>
> - --
> greg pryzby                              greg at pryzby dot org
> fingerprint: 8A1A DB90 869F 5DD1 D6E9 EEB6 C156 6B04 849F A86F
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