More Advanced Web Concepts

Now you can do basic text formatting (with in-line images) and you know how to add links to your pages, but still you wonder
How does the Webmaster at www.widgets.com get all those way cool effects on his Web pages? And are they really what makes a document good? Hmm...
Here are some brief answers to these questions:

More HTML Features

Forms
There's a simple form on these course pages, but they can be more complicated, like this one on the Engineering Science pages. Good introductions to forms are Mosaic for X version 2.0 Fill-Out Form Support at NCSA and Instantaneous Introduction to HTML Forms from U. Kansas
Clickable image maps
These allow you to create images that look like buttons or maps with links to other documents which depend on where in the image you click. The Computer Science page has one, as does the Global Network Navigator page (and so do lots of others). Setting these up is covered in any of the more advanced HTML guides.

Features of HTML Dialects

Lots of the fashionable new features are not officially a part of HTML at all, but are nonetheless supported by some or all browsers. Basically, there are two main "dialects" of enhanced HTML developing in parallel:
HTML 3
The "official" next version of HTML (the current version is 2), HTML 3 includes support for forms, centering, tables, figures, lists with graphical "bullets", equations, and more. Good references on HTML and all its dialects can be found from the W3 consortium's HTML page.

HTML with the "Netscape enhancements"
Pushed by the friendly folks who brought you the Netscape browser, this contains some of the same features as HTML 3 and some others (like the blink tag) which aren't in HTML 3. Unfortunately, it also does some of the same things in different ways (like centering). You can find more information through Netscape's help buttons or, better yet, read this nice tutorial from MIT.
Even though you can do lots of desirable things with either or a combination of these dialects, neither of them is official, and nobody knows what will be official, say, one or two years from now.

The point: Relying heavily on these features will make your pages "cooler", but harder to maintain as the language evolves.

Web Authoring Style

Once you've got the mechanics of HTML down, you can find plenty of people on the Web who would like to tell you how your document "should" look and whether all those fancy HTML features you used have really improved your documents.

It's a good idea to take a look at a few "style guides", for example:


Author: Jim McDonald <jim@engr.trinity.edu>
Last modified: Fri Sep 29 13:14:57 CDT 1995