creating webpages and online books

kowalskil · Sep 10, 2012

A short introductory tutorial on creation of webpages (and online books) has been posted at:

http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/misc/tutor1.pdf

Prolescum · Sep 10, 2012

Firstly, A for effort.
However, it is bad form to write a webpage tutorial for general use and suggest content is written using a word processor (even though you later promote the use of a text editor for creating the HTML file itself). It is best to avoid word processors altogether.

Secondly, you use internet when you mean web (damn you Microsoft and your Internet Explorer!). It's better to be accurate than colloquial.

Thirdly, you state that "[a] webpage is a file whose extension is html"; this is not strictly true. There are many types of webpage (MathML, XML, XHTML, PHP, ASP etc) with variable extensions. For example, PHP (whose extension is .php) allows server-side computations and dynamic content to be displayed, although the viewable content itself will be in HTML. I realise that this isn't terribly important for your "basics" tutorial, but you're giving an incomplete picture. This is never a good thing.

You have also neglected to declare the doctype (see below) so the web browser can render the content correctly. This is particularly important when the most widely used web browser (Internet Explorer) can barely handle width and height correctly.

Code:

<i>
</i><!doctype html>
<!-- Note: the doctype "html" used here refers to _HTML5_ only -->
<head>
<title> practicing </title>
</head>
<body>
<h1> Introduction </h1>
<p> This set of notes is for myself. ... blah blah blah (yes, I am abbreviating the first paragraph)
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah
blah.</p>
<p> To create a webpage I usually ... blah blah blah (yes, I am abbreviating the second
paragraph) blah blah blah blah blah blah.</p>
<p> Suppose the process has been completed ... blah blah blah (yes, I am abbreviating the
fourth paragraph) blah blah blah blah blah blah. </p>
</body>
</html>

It is good practice to give a basic overview of CSS when giving a basic tutorial on HTML, as previous versions of HTML (where style attributes can be given within tags) are being depricated in favour of using stylesheets with your HTML. This means your tutorial is already out of date, and therefore a less useful resource.

Code:

<i>
</i><img src="blah.png" alt="Image of blah" width="450px" height="250px">

becomes

Code:

<i>
</i>/* CSS for image - this can be added to the <head> section within <style> tags or as a separate file */

img {
	height: 250px;
	width: 450px;
}

Code:

<i>
</i>
<img src="blah.png" alt="Image of blah">

CSS also gives you the option of defining how other content is displayed, such as header tags

Code:

<i>
</i>
/* CSS for header tags */

h1 {
	color: #000;
	font-family: Times New Roman;
	font-size: 36px; /* I use px here for illustrative purposes */
}

Code:

<i>
</i><h1>Introduction</h1>

rather than adding style definitions to the tags themselves or letting the web browser's settings define it for you.

There are also a number of grammatical errors in your .pdf that you might want to fix.

I hope you take this criticism as it is intended (to help make a better document).

creating webpages and online books

kowalskil

New Member

Prolescum

New Member