I wanted to screw around with my blog page (again) and it’s been so long that I’ve forgotten how to do it decently. I’ll try to document my thought processes here so I can come back and scream at myself: “What the H**L were you thinking?”
There are many different discussions, explanations and tutorials out there to get one started on designing a web page from scratch, and doing it right. But this is my site and this is my take:
A HTML page is a page of information, mostly in text format.
A hyperlink within that HTML page will link you to another HTML page with some more information and more hyperlinks. Take a look under the skirts of any webpage. Use “View > Page Source” for Firefox or “View > Source” for Internet Explorer.
Tags are those thingies between triangular brackets; “<>”. They mark-up text. It gives it an intrinsic hierarchical value within the HTML document. “<h1>” and “</h1>means whatever text in between is a Level 1 Heading. “</p>” and “<p>” means it’s a normal paragraph and so on and so forth. The tags surrounding your text describe its importance and relation to the other information within your document.
This is semantic coding. You decide what deserves to be a paragraph, what deserves to be a sub-heading as you write out your document. There shouldn’t be any element of formatting. Formatting or styling means how your information is going to look like. I feel that Design and Content should be separated. Some designers are more militant about this than others. You decide how militant you want to be as you go along but let’s just say it’s fairly good advice.
Next time round, I’ll describe what the 3 main parts of a HTML page are;
- The DTD
- The Head
- The Body
If this explanation doesn’t quite do it justice, well then I highly recommend you go straight to htmldog.com where they don’t try to confuse you so much about semantic coding or boagworld.com, where they try to straighten out this semantic nonsense much better than I do.
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