Tips for Webbuilding

unwashed potato! · 2 May 2006 at 14:52

im currently attempting to learn webbuilding in my free time and am using this website to help me, however sometimes i read other posts and find people say oh you should learn that to do this etc etc so im a unsure on what is best to learn. for example i see people make websites using tables, however people are teling them not to and to do something else. Is there any tips you can give me for anything id need on a web.

Things like best thing to learn for forms, for the layout, for inserting pictures etc etc. Hope this makes sense. thanks

Inquisitor · 2 May 2006 at 15:10

Well, I'd start off by getting a decent text editor such as Notepad++ with syntax highlighting. I'd recommend making sure your markup is XHTML compliant and making good use of CSS to write web pages. You can find some decent tutorials on them here:

HTML - introduction to HTML
XHTML - outlines the differences between the HTML and XHTML specifications
CSS - introduction to CSS

With regards to tables, it's best practice to avoid using tables for anything but what they're designed for, that is displaying data in tabular format. They're quite popular for building website layouts because they provide a way of structuring your content, but generally you shouldn't do this (there are numerous disadvantages but I won't go into them). Instead, you should use <div> elements, which basically represent boxes, along with CSS in order to structure your website.

gord · 2 May 2006 at 15:29

Cant see why tables are so popular, the concept of divs is hardly rocket science.. and muchos better..

Good luck to you champ, you'll be banging out sites in no time.

Mr_L · 2 May 2006 at 17:10

The following two websites may also be of some use; -

Selectutorial: CSS Selectors
Semantics, HTML, XHTML and Structure

akakjs · 2 May 2006 at 20:37

gord said:
Cant see why tables are so popular, the concept of divs is hardly rocket science.. and muchos better..

one word: browser support. Tables work in everything from lynx to ie7, but importantly without changing that much in appearence. Divs and css takes a lot more effort to scale (but the results are more flexable).

At work we still have a tables based website, not because we're anti-tables, but because it suits our target market much more closely.

akakjs

blade007 · 2 May 2006 at 23:41

a lot of designers will curse tables, you only have to look at css zengarden to see why.

but! a LOT of sites use tables (even pro built sites). from what I've seen it is more reliably rendered. and it permits some basic vertical positioning of objects in the cell - It's more tricky to do this in css.