9 replies to this topic

[Kanashimi]

Forgive me if what I'm asking is very simple/obvious, but I'm new to html.

Is there any way to move things to specific places? If so, how? I just know about the <align> tag, and that doesn't do a lot.

Thanks,
Kanashimi

[Thom]

You'll have to be more specific.

It looks, though, as though you're trying to use HTML to define the appearance of a page. HTML is for structure and content only. The appearance should be defined with an external CSS stylesheet.

[Kanashimi]

I guess I'll look up CSS then...

Edit: I see. Thanks, Thom.

Edited by Kanashimi, 01 April 2008 - 09:45 AM.

[CaptainSlug]

http://www.ncdesign.org is your one-stop HTML reference guide

If you want to define the layout of a page it's best to use tables. You can define margins or absolute spacings using style sheets, but some CSS functions are not widely compatible.

Edited by CaptainSlug, 01 April 2008 - 09:57 AM.

[Kanashimi]

Ooh, thanks Captain Slug! This website will help a lot. I needed a good way to waste my time. Since I just got into actually modifying and stuff, I don't have many guns or supplies. Messing with Html, Css, and etc will be a good waste of time.

-Kanashimi

Edit to OMC: Well, he does have his own website, so you would expect him to know about how to make a website. However, I do agree with you. =)

Edited by Kanashimi, 01 April 2008 - 11:21 AM.

[One Man Clan]

Jesus Slug, what DON'T you know about?

[boisie]

Quote

If you want to define the layout of a page it's best to use tables

Are you on crack? Are you serious? Divs allow for faster page render, especially when nesting them. Tables must be rendered one at a time, causing the innermost to get rendered first. But it won't be visible because its container is not visible. Divs allow rendering to happen simultaneously, giving a speedier render.

Edited by boisie, 01 April 2008 - 08:46 PM.

[Thom]

CaptainSlug, on Apr 1 2008, 10:47 AM, said:

If you want to define the layout of a page it's best to use tables. You can define margins or absolute spacings using style sheets, but some CSS functions are not widely compatible.

This hasn't been true for years. As long as you don't try to use bleeding-edge features, compatibility is no problem. You will save yourself an incredible amount of time, frustration, and professional scorn. I do this professionally.

Take a look at my most recent work, redoing the main part of their site: http://www.subboard.com/. Look at how simple the source is; all the rendering is done with one stylesheet (two if you're on IE). Every one of those pges uses 100% valid, semantic HTML. (The jobs page won't run through a validator because the guy running the jobs database has bad Unicode chars in there; I'm trying to find him to fix it.)

Now, if you're planning to do this, you'll need more than Notepad and IE. I can't recommend it personally (I'm on the Mac), but I've heard wonderful thing about Notepad++. Of course, you should be testing first in Firefox or another standards-compliant browser (Opera, Safari). If using FF, I HIGHLY recommend the Web Developer and (especially) Firebug extensions. The former has a variety of functions such as validation and twiddling settings; the latter is a multipurpose debugger that does everything from javascript debugging to manually altering HTTP sessions, and has the best DOM/CSS inspector I've ever seen.

[CaptainSlug]

Everybody pile on. I can take an unlimited number of people attacking my personal opinion.

I'm not promoting you make a cluster of dozens of tables to format your page. For beginners who are just starting to learn HTML and want to format a page it's just best to say "use a table" because they're not hard to do. Learning how to do them the same way in stylesheets on the other hand is harder to teach.

I first learned HTML and CSS in 1995 when CSS wasn't really used anywhere and almost nobody knew how to make a website that wasn't ugly. It wasn't accepted or widely compatible until 2000. It's extremely compatible now, but learning how to use it properly isn't easy.

He can learn HTML first then learn how to do many of the same things faster with CSS. Learning both at the same time for most people is just too confusing. If you have ever had to teach Joe Public how to do this kind of stuff you might understand this.

Edited by CaptainSlug, 02 April 2008 - 09:31 PM.

[Thom]

Quote

I'm not promoting you make a cluster of dozens of tables to format your page. For beginners who are just starting to learn HTML and want to format a page it's just best to say "use a table" because they're not hard to do. Learning how to do them the same way in stylesheets on the other hand is harder to teach.

I first learned HTML and CSS in 1995 when CSS wasn't really used anywhere and almost nobody knew how to make a website that wasn't ugly. It wasn't accepted or widely compatible until 2000. It's extremely compatible now, but learning how to use it properly isn't easy.

He can learn HTML first then learn how to do many of the same things faster with CSS. Learning both at the same time for most people is just too confusing. If you have ever had to teach Joe Public how to do this kind of stuff you might understand this.

Either way, you have to learn how to create well-structured documents and how to make them look the way you want them to. With tabular layout, you learn an inferior method of the latter that teaches bad habits for the former, and then you have to learn how to do it the right way from scratch.

Properly written HTML is almost trivially intuitive; once you learn the basic syntax and the most common elements, you can easily turn even the most complex documents into well-written semantic HTML, and the only complex part is the style sheet. Tabular layouts make the HTML hard as well as wrong. The only way to avoid CSS is to write crappy code, using obsolete deprecated elements and poor practices. That's no way to learn anything, even if it seems easier at first.

I don't mean to flame; this is just very important to me as a web professional. The single biggest obstacle to progress on the web is not Internet Explorer, bandwidth, or industry politics, but bad code cranked out by people who never learned better.

Here are a couple of examples. View the source on each; which one is easier to follow? Good example | Bad Example