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How to Build a Database Driven Web Site
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Putting Sound on your Web Site - Part 2
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Understanding HTML
HTML is a relatively simple language, in some places it is
almost completely readable and understandable but that doesn't
stop people from having problems with it. Why is that? It's
mainly because, while the HTML tags themselves are easy,
creating an HTML document that works as intended on a web server
requires you to know a few extra things that aren't often
explained. Here, then, is a quick guide to understanding those
parts of HTML that they just don't tell you about in the books.
It is meant to work as a check-list for those writing HTML
documents - perhaps with emphasis on all those doing it for the
first time.
Understand Doctypes.
It isn't often noted that valid HMTL documents don't actually
start with the tag - they have one extra tag before it.
This is the doctype, and it must be present right at the top of
your document for it to be valid HTML.
There are only really two doctypes that you really need to know
about. The HTML4 doctype looks like this:
These versions of the doctypes that are a little more forgiving
- if you're a purist, you can use the strict ones instead by
changing the words 'transitional' and 'loose' to 'strict'.
But what is the doctype for? Well, its purpose is simple enough:
it tells web browsers exactly what version of HTML your page was
written in, to help them to interpret it correctly.
Understand HTTP Errors.
A truly shocking number of people writing HTML pages don't know
how HTTP works - and they quickly run into trouble because of
it. HTTP is the way a web browser communicates with a web
server, and this communication includes information about your
pages, such as cookies.
You don't need to worry too much about the internals of HTTP,
but it's worth knowing that it works by the browser sending a
request to the server for a certain page, and the server then
responding with a code.
Your website should be set up to handle error codes well. For
example, a 404 (page not found) error should show a page with
links to the most useful parts of your site. Other common error
codes include:
MIME types are another part of the HTML header - an important
one. Also known as the content-type header, they tell the
browser what kind of file they are about to send. Browsers don't
rely on HTML files ending in .html, JPEG images ending in .jpeg,
and so on: they rely on the content-type header. If you don't
know about this, you can have problems if you need to configure
your server to send anything unusual.
Here are some common MIME types:
text/html - HTML.
text/css - CSS
text/plain - plain text.
image/gif - GIF image.
image/jpeg - JPEG image.
image/png - PNG image.
audio/mpeg - MP3 audio file.
application/x-shockwave-flash - Flash movie.
Understand Link Paths.
One of the hardest things to understand about HTML is all the
different things that you can put in an 'href' property.
Abbreviated URLs are created using the rules of old text-based
operating systems, and there are plenty of people writing HTML
today who are completely unfamiliar with these rules.
To put it simply, one dot means "in the folder we're in now",
while two dots means "in the folder above the one we're in now".
This can get confusing fast - just look at the difference one
dot can make! Be careful with it.
Understand How to Insert Things That Aren't HTML.
One of the most common HTML questions is how to insert things
like Javascript and CSS into an HTML document. This is one of
the easiest questions to answer: you simply use the link and
script tags, like this:
