HTML 4_01 Weekend Crash Course - G. Perry

<br> We’ll keep you up to date and provide plenty of pictures!

<br><br> (When you see a small picture, click it to see a larger version.)

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<b>We’re movin</b>

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second is the smaller, thumbnail version. Make both available in our images folder. Update the size

of the larger image when the picture changes. -->

<a href=”http://www.BarkleyFamilyPage.com/ourhouse.gif”> <img border=0 src=”ourhousT.jpg” align=top

width=105 height=82 alt=”Our New Home (168 Kb)”> </a>

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<font face=Arial size=3 color=#CC9900> <b>g to the country!</b>

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<font face=Arial size=2 color=black> <font face=Arial size=2> <br> You’ve seen the

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Whew! Listing 29-1 is certainly long. If you went through the code analyzing the comments to learn how well-documented the code is, you are almost to the end of your 30-minute session already.

Improving the Way Text Is Presented

Before finishing this session, you must understand one final aspect of a Web page that this tutorial has not yet had the opportunity to address. You must understand that text on a Web page does not translate well into a book’s format, and more important, a book doesn’t translate well into Web text. This section explains the flow of the text on your site. How does your message come across? If you have a lot to say, how do you go about presenting all those words using a medium that shuns wordiness?

The Web and printed media are two completely different kinds of reading vehicles. One does not replace the other. Users read text from the two kinds of media differently. Skimming the headlines is the normal way for a user to view a Web page. Too much text will not confuse the user, but the user has more than a billion pages out there vying for his or her attention, and you must assume that your user’s attention is more fleeting than the newspaper reader’s attention. If you don’t make your text scannable by including numerous headlines and divisions, your user won’t read the text.

3.Name the purposes for HTML documentation. (See “Write the documentation.”)

4.How does reading a Web page differ from reading a newspaper? (See “Improving the Way Text is Presented.”)

5.What are some of the ways you can improve the readability of text on your site? (See “Improving the Way Text is Presented.”)

Growth Increases Demand for HTML

Nobody sells the Internet. In 1994, before most people knew what the Internet was, no company made it their goal to “make the Internet the greatest innovation of the next ten years.” The Internet’s huge growth came about as the result of technology coming together at the right time. The Internet happened; it was

not planned. In 1994, companies wanted to be a part of this thing called “the Internet,” and they formulated business strategies to jump onto the expected growth, and they did everything they could think of to increase the growth, but they would not and could not fathom that more than one billion Web pages would be in use at the turn of the next century.

One cannot fathom what the next ten years will bring. You do know that growth in the Internet will occur, that most of the world is not yet connected to the Internet, and that technology is getting faster and less expensive. The Internet will continue to grow, and given the past, it’s safe to assume that its growth will far surpass today’s expectations. Where does that growth leave you, the newcomer to HTML programming? Exactly where you want to be: in the middle of things!

New Hardware Brings HTML Challenges

If you program with HTML, then actually you are in a better position than anyone to respond to changes in technology. Look at the newest versions of Windows. The online help system, for ten years, remained fairly stable and manifested itself in a uniform format across all Windows applications. A collapsible tree-structured list of topics presented you with an overview or with detail about a specific item.

When the Web came along, much of it was not being designed to suit Windows. Although the Web page’s command buttons, scroll bars, and browser designs were borrowed from Windows and the Mac (and ultimately, from Sun, which developed a Mac-like prototype, with mouse, years before the first Mac hit the streets), the browser’s language, HTML, was intended to proliferate text across networked computers, linking the computers and documents with hyperlinks embedded inside the HTML code.

As time wore on, Windows became more like the Web; the Web did not become more like Windows! Think about the help system you now have on your Windows machine. The help system works inside a browser with a scroll bar and hyperlinks. In addition, almost all of today’s help systems are written in HTML. The designers chose the simplicity of HTML to change the entire nature of online help systems.

to accent your HTML coding experience. You might even try your hand at actual Java programming, a task that differs greatly from JavaScript in nature. Trust your instincts. If you like HTML coding, and another Web language catches your interest, that new Web language may be the next big language that uses HTML as a stepping stone to take hold of an area of online service.

As online access expands, as it will continue to do, and as wireless technologies grow, people will no longer be tethered to a desktop PC for online access or a laptop- to-phone connection. The Bluetooth kinds of technology mentioned earlier provide a niche that offers short-range, wide-access, wireless technology. In a nutshell, such technology enables devices within short distances of each other to communicate with each other at high speeds. This technology enables organizations with several warehouses spread across a few square miles, such as airports, to connect their computers, phones, and other video and audio communications without wires, meaning that the on-the-ground personnel have as much information available

to them as the corporate office workers.

Even though such technology will dramatically change the way people use computers and connect to the World Wide Web’s resources, the goal is the same as it’s always been: provide fast access to information. That’s what you will be doing more of. These new technologies work just as today’s modem-based PCs work, in that your HTML code browses for the information the user wants to see. The HTML must change, however, not in nature but in expansion of new connections. You won’t be limited to screen pixels because tomorrow’s technologies will output to controlling modules inside jets as well as to voice-enabled devices that answer a user’s request in spoken language instead of showing the user the simple data. You will be writing to a giant array of output devices, and HTML will have to adapt to new devices for output. Other languages will adapt as well, such as DHTML, JavaScript, XML, and whatever other HTML-based languages appear on the horizon.

The Future: WebTV and PDAs

To give you a taste of current forward-thinking uses for HTML code, the next two short sections demonstrate WebTV and PDAs (personal data assistants). These technologies are in their infancies. The WebTV as it exists today will probably change dramatically in the next few years, perhaps even disappearing when another, more general, Internet appliance takes it place. Nevertheless, the considerations you’ll take into account with regard to WebTV device-based HTML are similar to some of the considerations you’ll have to take into account with regard to future technologies you’ll write for. By looking at PDA device-based HDML (an offshoot of HTML),