i hadn't designed a web page from the ground up for about 9 years, then
i was asked to do one. I'd dabbled with html and vaigly kept up with
some of the developments but other than that i've been stuck in 1996-7
thinking looking at web pages become more and more sophistocated (and
frequently slower to load!)
Back then html 3.2 was still the norm and the idea of seperating
structure and content, let alone style and structure was only just
emerging into general use. asp and server side scripting was new,
cgi and perl was the common way to get interactivity, plus java applets
and javascript. Most pages settled on being static
pages were either plain or gaudily colored, many folks had their
geocities home sites either cobbled together or simply borne of some
document resulting from 'save as html'. Netscape 2 and IE3 users were
still common.
My web sites werent very good either!
The main difference i see in the last 5 or so years is that websites
have a 'desktop publishing page' look, with nice curved pastel shaded
graphics disguising what looks like a table structure and menu
navigation offered not through frames (!) but neat buttons that appear
consistently in each page - just about every site offered at
http://www.oswd.org/ has this look.
The first thing i did was check out w3c to see what was happening -
html 4.01, xhtml, css. then i checked out editors. Back then i liked
a mix of wysiwyg and plain text, now i am more minded to look at solid
plain text editors. Suprisingly a couple of the oldies were still
around but i quite liked htmlbuilder, acehtml, evrsoft and topstyle as
examples.
After some rapid catching up, being pleased at what is possible now and
experimenting i've concluded that a structural approach is the way to
do things in 2006 (well, since the late 90's!)
seperate structure from style from content.
the basic structure in terms of tables and text, image layout and so on
to be done with html, the style worked out seperately and applied with
css (css1 seems most widely compatible) and content - well content can
be managed in so many ways from just leaving it in the html, to using
server side includes to using a database and some server side
scripting.
Does that seem like a good approach to you? I ought to get a good
book too, any recommendations ? Finally - out of interest - when did
you start with html and authoring web pages? any fond memories!?
i was asked to do one. I'd dabbled with html and vaigly kept up with
some of the developments but other than that i've been stuck in 1996-7
thinking looking at web pages become more and more sophistocated (and
frequently slower to load!)
Back then html 3.2 was still the norm and the idea of seperating
structure and content, let alone style and structure was only just
emerging into general use. asp and server side scripting was new,
cgi and perl was the common way to get interactivity, plus java applets
and javascript. Most pages settled on being static
pages were either plain or gaudily colored, many folks had their
geocities home sites either cobbled together or simply borne of some
document resulting from 'save as html'. Netscape 2 and IE3 users were
still common.
My web sites werent very good either!
The main difference i see in the last 5 or so years is that websites
have a 'desktop publishing page' look, with nice curved pastel shaded
graphics disguising what looks like a table structure and menu
navigation offered not through frames (!) but neat buttons that appear
consistently in each page - just about every site offered at
http://www.oswd.org/ has this look.
The first thing i did was check out w3c to see what was happening -
html 4.01, xhtml, css. then i checked out editors. Back then i liked
a mix of wysiwyg and plain text, now i am more minded to look at solid
plain text editors. Suprisingly a couple of the oldies were still
around but i quite liked htmlbuilder, acehtml, evrsoft and topstyle as
examples.
After some rapid catching up, being pleased at what is possible now and
experimenting i've concluded that a structural approach is the way to
do things in 2006 (well, since the late 90's!)
seperate structure from style from content.
the basic structure in terms of tables and text, image layout and so on
to be done with html, the style worked out seperately and applied with
css (css1 seems most widely compatible) and content - well content can
be managed in so many ways from just leaving it in the html, to using
server side includes to using a database and some server side
scripting.
Does that seem like a good approach to you? I ought to get a good
book too, any recommendations ? Finally - out of interest - when did
you start with html and authoring web pages? any fond memories!?
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