Links

The purpose of this page is provide an annotated of further resources for webdesign. These links either cover topics not covered in this tutorial, provide alternative sources for similar material, or provide online summaries of HTML tags and usage.

Tutorials and References

NCSA -- A Beginner's Guide to HTML: The NCSA primer is one of the classic HTML references on the web, and while no longer actively maintained, it is still worth reading. It provides an excellent explanation of HTML tags, the structure of an HTML document, etc.

W3C Technical Reports and Publications: A list of publications from the World Wide Web Consortium. In particular, you will probably be most interested in their HTML 4.01 Specification, which defines and describes the HTML 4.01 standard.

Web Developer's Virtual Library: Use this website to find tutorials, articles and discussions. The list of topics is extensive and most areas of web design are covered.

Cascading Stylesheets: CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) provide a useful method of abstracting form from content in HTML documents. While they are easy to use, it is nice to have a handy reference to explain how to use them.

Mulder's Stylesheets Tutorial: This tutorial over at Webmonkey (part of Hotwired at Lycos) provides a step-by-step walk-through of certain stylesheet properties and applications. The number of concrete examples makes this a very useful resource.

A tutorial on character code issues: Coding pages for languages that don't use the standard western European Latin characters can be challenging. This site seeks to clarify some of the issues involved and describes the necessary terminology. For related information see ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup.

JavaScript.com: JavaScript has nothing to do with the Java programming language, and it is a nasty hack. That said, occasionally you might have need of JavaScript, and if that is the case, visit this site, where you can find free scripts as well as tutorials on how to use JavaScript.

Web Pages by (bad) Example

Web Pages That Suck: When it comes to web design, knowing what not to do is just as important as know what to do, and teaching good design practices through examples of bad design helps to drive home points. Web Pages That Suck is one of several sites providing such examples.

HTML Hell Page: Eric S. Raymond provides a concise and opinionated list of what he thinks sucks in a lot of webpages out there. And he is right.

Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design: Like the above link, this points out several specific examples of what mistakes many web designers make; furthermore, intelligent reasons are given for why these are actual serious mistakes.

The Ten Commandments of Good WWWeb Design: Now for some positive comments. This site tells you what you should do and take into consideration when designing web pages.

Tools

HTML TIDY: HTML TIDY provides a useful tool for cleaning up HTML code and for making sure it adheres to the standards. The program is available for a variety of computing platforms, including Windows 95/NT/etc., MacOS, Linux, etc.

Validation Services

W3C HTML Validation Service: After writing your pages, validate them -- make sure that you used the right types of tags in the right order, etc. This free service lets you input a URL and receive an instant analysis of that site.

Doctor HTML: This is another webpage validator. They also offer a commercial product for validating whole sites.

Organizations

W3C: As mentioned above, the World Wide Web Consortium is the web organization. Check them out for documentation, specifications and the like.

The HTML Writers Guild: "The HTML Writers Guild is the world's largest international organization of Web authors with over 118,000 members in more than 150 nations worldwide." They provide resources, services, links, etc.

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