- How do I indent the first line in my
paragraphs?
- How
do I indent a lot of text?
- Can
I put markup in ALT text?
- How
do I include one file in another?
- How
do I get scrolling text in the status bar?
- How
do I hide my source?
- How
can I make a custom rule, or a list with custom bullets?
- How
do I display the current date or time in my document?
- For
what screen size should I write?
- How
do I get my visitor's e-mail addresses?
- How
do I do a pagebreak?
- How
do I make a table which looks good on AOL and Prodigy?
- How
do I center a table?
- How
do I make animated GIFs?
- Is
there a way to get indexed better by the search engines?
- How
do I redirect someone to my new page?
- How
do I get a back button on my page?
- How
do I force a download?
- Why
is my binary file not downloaded, but shown on the
screen?
- How
do I use an image instead of the standard submit button?
- How
do I get a so-and-so character in my HTML?
- How
do I get a counter?
- How
do I detect what browser is being used?
- I
want to get an audio file to play automatically when
someone visits my site!
- Should
I put quotes around attribute values or not?
- Should
I use lower case or upper case for tags?
- My
images/hyperlinks are coming out all wrong, or don't
load! What's up?
- How
do I get a button which takes me to a new page?
This isn't really possible in a reliable way, until style
sheets are more widely supported. At this moment, there
are several browser-specific kludges and tricks available,
but these are not guaranteed to work.
1) Use a number of ( ) characters.
Netscape and related browsers do not collapse these,
like normal spaces, so this appears as an indent in
these browsers. Other browsers can display it as one
space.
2) Put a <DD> at the beginning of the line. This
is syntactically invalid, but Netscape works around
this by indenting the line at this point. Of course,
other browsers will handle this differently, and there
is no guarantee that Netscape will keep doing this.
3) Use a blank, transparent GIF, using WIDTH and HEIGHT
to indicate the desired whitespace. This is a very
ugly solution, as it only works if you have image loading
on, otherwise you get the "Image" icon at the beginning
of the line. Not all browsers support resizing using
these attributes, and you can only "indent" a certain
number of pixels, not characters. So the amount of "indentation"
varies with the font size used to display your document.
Again, there is no reliable way to do this. Netscape will
indent text inside a <BLOCKQUOTE>, but other browsers
don't have to do this. These could show the text in italics,
or perhaps with quotation marks around the text. This
could come out very strange.
An alternative is to use <DL> without <DT>
and <DD>, which is invalid HTML, but several browsers
work around this error by indenting the text inside it.
This is not guaranteed to work.
If you are willing to use tables for layout purposes,
there is another option. Create a one-cell table, as
follows:
<CENTER>
<TABLE width="80%">
<TR><TD><DIV align=left>
<!-- The text goes here -->
</DIV>
</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
</CENTER>
A drawback to this solution is that very long blocks inside
a table may take a while to download and may not appear
until the entire table has been downloaded. Another drawback
is that it may force users to resize their viewing window
after they have become accustomed to their preferred settings.
No. Character entities (©, &#nnn; and such)
are permitted, though.
If you want to know how to write good ALT texts without
markup, please see Alan Flavell's essay on choosing
ALT texts.
Use server-side includes, if your server supports them.
Ask your Webmaster if this is the case, and if so, what
the exact syntax is for your server.
Since server-side includes make the document slower, they
are not always desirable. If your documents only have
a static footer, which doesn't change every day, you might
be better off by using an editor which can insert files
in the current document, or a preprocessor. The C preprocessor
can do this, but there are also several HTML-specific
preprocessors available. I recommend Orb 1.3.
This is not an HTML question, it's done with a Javascript.
Check any page which has this feature, and copy the script
from the source.
This script has two big problems. One, usually it uses
the decrement operator (c--) at some point. The "--"
sequence in a comment actually closes it on some browsers,
so your code may "leak" on those browsers. The same
goes for ">".
Second, keep in mind that many people consider this
even worse than <BLINK>, and that it also suppresses
the status information which normally appears there.
It prevents people from knowing where a link goes to.
You can't. The source is necessary for the browser to
display your document. You have to send the complete,
unencrypted source to the browser. Even if a particular
browser doesn't have a "View source" option, there are
many that do, and you can always retrieve the document
by hand (using telnet) to get its source. Or check the
browser's cache.
You can of course put a few hundred empty lines above
the actual source, then newbies who don't see the scrollbars
will think there is nothing there.
There was a proposal in the now-expired HTML 3 draft to
handle exactly this: just add SRC to the <HR> or
<UL> tag, indicating where the image can be found.
But until this is more widely supported, you have to use
<IMG> for the rule, with a lot of "--" characters
as ALT text for text browsers, and using a <DL>
with only <DD> tags for each item. Make sure you
use ALIGN for the image, which should go at the beginning
of the item, of course. This isn't as beautiful as a "real"
list.
An alternative is using a two column table, with the bullets
in the left column, and the text in the right. But this
won't work well on non-table supporting browsers.
With server-side includes. Ask your webmaster if this
is supported, and what the exact syntax is for your server.
But this will display the local time on the server,
not for the client. And if the document is cached, the
date will of course be incorrect after some time.
JavaScript can be used to display the local time for the
client, but as most people already have one or more clocks
on their screen, why display another one?
HTML does not depend on screen size. The text will be
wrapped by the browser when the end of the screen is encountered.
The only exception to this is when you use <PRE>-formatted
text, which will only wrap at the line breaks you indicate.
So make sure these lines are no longer than 70 characters,
otherwise text mode users will see ugly line breaks on
their terminals. And users of graphical browsers might
have to scroll horizontally to see the rest, which is
one of the most hated things to do when you read a document.
Of course, an image cannot be wrapped, so you have
to be careful with that. It seems that 400 or 500 pixels
is a reasonable width; anything above 600 will mean
a certain percentage of users will have to scroll to
see the rightmost bit. This percentage increases with
your image width. Keep in mind that not everyone runs
his browser at full screen!
You can't. Although each request for a document is usually
logged with the name or address of the remote host, the
actual username is almost never logged as well. This is
mostly because of performance reasons, as it would require
that the server uses the ident protocol to see who is
on the other end. This takes time. And if a cache proxy
is doing the request, you don't get anything sensible.
In Netscape 2.0, it was possible to automatically submit
a form with a mailto as action, using Javascript. This
would send e-mail to the document's owner, with the address
the visitor configured in the From line. Of course, that
can be "mickey.mouse@disney.com". This is fixed in Netscape
2.01.
The most reliable way is to put up a form, asking the
visitor to fill in his e-mail address. If you offer him
something in return, he will most likely do it.
You don't. HTML is not a page layout language. It's up
to the browser to decide where and how to insert page
breaks when the document is being printed.
However, style sheets (not widely supported yet, although
Microsoft's Internet Explorer is beginning to use it)
will include support to indicate preferred points for
page breaks, probably somewhat like the way LaTeX handles
this.
The best way is probably to include a version in preformatted
text. This can be seen by any browser, including Lynx.
If you absolutely must have a table,
check out Alan Flavell's document
on tables for a good discussion.
The "correct" way of doing it is <TABLE ALIGN=CENTER>,
but this doesn't work in several popular browsers. Put
<CENTER> around the entire table for these browsers.
This causes some problems with browser that do support
CENTER but not tables, such as Lynx. In these browsers,
the contents of the cells is now displayed centered,
which is not what is intended. To avoid this, you can
put the cell's contents in <P ALIGN=left> or <DIV
ALIGN=left> depending on the amount of text in the
cell.
Ask on the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.images
group.
Yes. Put these two statements in the <HEAD> part
of your documents:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keyword keyword keyword keyword">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="description of your site">
Both may contain up to 1022 characters. If a keyword is
used more than 7 times the keywords tag will be ignored
altogether. Also, you can't put markup (other than entities)
in the description or keywords list. Infoseek and Alta Vista are using this.
The most reliable way is to configure the server to send
out a redirection instruction when the old URL is requested.
Then the browser will automatically get the new URL. This
is the fastest way to do this. You can of course also
simply put up a small page with a text like "This page
has moved to http://new.url/, please adjust your bookmarks".
A Netscape-only solution, which doesn't work on other
browsers, and screws up the "back" button in Netscape,
is
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="x; URL=new.URL">
which will load the new URL after x seconds. This should
go in the HEAD of the document. But if you do this, also
include a short text saying "Document moved to new URL
so-and-so" for other browsers.
(The screwing-up bit refers to the fact that if you
press "Back" after you have been redirected, you will
be taken to the document with the META refresh. Then
the refresh will be activated, and so you'll jump to
the page you just tried to leave.)
In HTML, this is impossible. Going "back" means that you
go to the previous page in your history. You might be
able to create a link to the URL specified in the "HTTP_REFERER"
environment variable in your document, but that only creates
a link to a new location in your history. Even
worse, the information in that variable can be plain wrong.
Some browsers incorrectly send the variable when you use
a bookmark or type in an URL manually, and some don't
send that variable at all. Then you would end up with
an empty link.
A JavaScript could use "history.back()" to do this, but
this only works in Netscape 2.
For a more detailed explanation, please see Abigail's
"Simulating the
back button".
You can't. Next question, please.
Ok, I'll explain anyway. :-) When someone downloads
a document, the server tells the browser what type of
file it is. The browser then picks the appropriate helper
application, or displays it himself. If the server doesn't
know the file type, it tells the browser that the file
is "text/plain", or just plain text. You will have to
ask your server admin to configure this particular file
with the MIME type you want.
"Forcing" a download is not what you are supposed to
do. After all, what is more convenient than having the
proper application started when I download a particular
file? Browsing through a download directory can be quite
a pain. And most browsers allow the user to download
to disk if they want to.
If the file must be saved to disk,
as there is absolutely NO other way to handle it, the
MIME type should be "application/octet-stream".
Actually, the browser has downloaded the document,
it is just treating it as a plain text file. This is because
the server said it was a plain text file. To
get the file in the helper application (or plug-in), you
will have to configure the server to send out the right
MIME type, and the browser to start the appropriate helper
application for files with that MIME type.
Use <INPUT NAME=foo TYPE=image SRC="http://url.to/image.gif">
instead of the normal submit tag. There is no way to do
this for the reset button.
Note that some browsers will also send the x and y
coordinates of the location where the user clicked on
the image to the server. They are available as "foo.x=000&foo.y=000"
in the CGI input.
HTML text is supposed to be written in the ISO Latin-1
character set. A complete overview of all the characters
in this set is available from:
Either ask your Webmaster for access to the log files,
or for a server-side include which can do this, or use
one of the freeware counters available at the CGI archives.
There is no HTML tag to do this.
Counters are quite pointless, though. They can be set
to any value the owner wants, so they don't give you any
information. Because of the delay that often occurs when
using an external counter, your visitors may get annoyed
with the long loading time of your document. The server's
logfile provides a lot more reliable information for you,
and you don't have to bother your readers with it.
Many browsers identify themselves when they request a
document. A CGI script will have this information available
in the HTTP_USER_AGENT environment variable, and it can
use that to send out a version of the document which is
optimized for that browser.
Keep in mind not all browsers identify themselves correctly.
Microsoft Internet Explorer, for example, claims to be
"Mozilla 1.2" to get at Netscape enhanced documents.
And of course, if a cache proxy keeps the Netscape enhanced
document, someone with an other browser will also get
this document if he goes through the cache.
Bleh. What if I visit your site at 3am, and there's someone
sleeping in the next room?
For Netscape, this is done using the <EMBED>
tag. You can also do this with the Netscape <META>
refresh tag, as described earlier. Just put the URL
of the audio file in the CONTENT field.
There is also a MS Internet Explorer specific tag to
do this: <BGSOUND SRC=URL> which plays the file
specified in the SRC attribute automatically. You can
add LOOP followed by a value or the keyword "INFINITE"
to indicate how many times the sound should be played.
It depends. It is never wrong to use them, but you don't
have to if the attribute value consists only of letters,
digits, periods and/or hyphens. This is explained in the
HTML
2.0 specs.
Oh, and keep in mind that if you use double quotes, you
should escape any quotes inside the value with """
so you don't accidentally terminate the value prematurely.
Tags are case insensitive, so it doesn't matter. This
is just a matter of style. Many people prefer upper case,
as it makes the tags "stand out" better amongst the text.
Most likely you forgot to close a quote at the end of
an HREF or SRC. Alternatively, perhaps you used a ">"
character in an ALT text or somewhere else inside a tag.
Although this is legal, several older browsers will think
the tag ends there, so the rest is displayed as normal
text.
This especially happens if you use comment tags to
"comment out" text with HTML tags. Although the correct syntax
is <!-- --> (without "--" occurring anywhere inside
the comment), some browsers will think the comment ends
at the first > they see.
This is done with a small form:
<FORM ACTION="http://url.you.want.to.go.to/" METHOD=GET>
<INPUT TYPE=submit VALUE="Text on button" NAME=foo>
</FORM>
If you want to line up buttons next to each other, you
will have to put them in a one-row table, with each button
in a separate cell.
Thanks to Warren Steel, David Henderson and William
Johnston for their comments.
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