Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS

Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS

Dave Taylor

Dave Taylor

Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS

Copyright © 2004 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Control Number: 2004100892

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Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980, when he first logged in as an

undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego Since then, he’s been a research

scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, reviews editor for SunWorld

magazine, and founder of four companies: The Internet Mall, iTrack.com, AnswerSquad, and ClickThruStats.com Currently, Dave is president of Intuitive Systems and is busy launching

an electronic book publishing company called Intuitive Press

Dave has designed over 50 Web sites, both commercial and nonprofit, and has published more than 1000 articles about the Internet, Unix, Macintosh, interface design, and business

topics His books include Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther (O’Reilly), Wicked Cool Shell Scripts (No Starch Press), Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours (Sams Publishing), and Solaris For Dummies (Wiley Publishing)

Dave holds a master’s degree in Educational Computing from Purdue University, an M.B.A from the University of Baltimore, an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the University of California at San Diego, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the University of Phoenix Online

You can find Dave Taylor online just about any time at http://www.intuitive.com/, or you can send him electronic mail at taylor@intuitive.com

Mary Beth Wakefield

Vice President and Executive Group Publisher

Quality Control Technician

To Kiana, Gareth, and Ashley, my guardian angels

Who should buy this book? What’s covered? How do I read this book? Why should I read this book? HTML? XHTML? CSS? Sheesh! Why not just use a Web page editor? Who am I?

Welcome!

“Wow! Another Web book! What makes this one different?”

That’s a fair question I want you to be confident that Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS will meet your needs as well as provide fun and interesting reading So

spend a minute and breeze through my preface to ensure that this is the book you seek

What This Book Is About

In a nutshell, Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS is an introduction to

HTML, XHTML, and Cascading Style Sheets HTML is the HyperText Markup Language, and it’s the language that enables you to create and publish your own multimedia documents on the World Wide Web Millions of users on the Internet and online services such as America Online, Earthlink, and the Microsoft Network are spending hours each day exploring the world

of the Web from within their Web browser, be it Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, or any of

a variety of other programs XHTML is the modern “proper” version of HTML and is the future

of the markup language Cascading Style Sheets are also part of that future, and it’s a rare modern Web site that doesn’t use at least some element of CSS in its design and layout

By using all these technologies, you can learn to quickly and easily create attractive docu­

ments that are on the cutting edge of interactive publishing I went through the pain of learn­ing HTML back in 1994, the very dawn of the Web era, precisely because I wanted to spread

my ideas to a global audience For me, learning was hit or miss because the only references

I could find were confusing online documents written by programmers and computer types For you, it will be a lot easier By reading this book and exploring the software and samples included on the companion Web site, you can learn not only the nuts and bolts of HTML, XHTML, and CSS, but also quite a lot about how to design and create useful, attractive Web sites and spread the word about them on the Net

Preface

xii

Before you delve into this book, you should know the basics: what the Internet is, how to get

on it, and how to use your Web browser If you seek detailed information on these topics, you can find many interesting and useful books from Wiley Publishing at http://www.wiley.com/

compbooks After you have this basic knowledge, you’ll find that Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS is a fun introduction to the art and science of creating interesting—

and, if I may say so, cool—Web sites that you’ll be proud of and that other users will want to visit and explore

Why Not Just Use a Web Page Builder?

If you’ve already flipped through this book to see what’s covered, you’ve seen a ton of differ­ent sample listings with lots and lots of < and > instructions Yet the advertisements in every computer magazine are telling you that you don’t need to get your hands dirty with HTML and CSS when you can use a Web page editor So what’s the scoop?

The scoop—or the problem, really—is that every Web page editor I’ve used is designed to create pages for a particular Web browser and has at best a limited understanding of the rich, complex, evolving HTML language Use Microsoft Front Page 2000, for example, and your site will almost certainly look best in Internet Explorer (a Microsoft product)

It’s a subtle but insidious problem One clue to this lurking problem is that surveys of Web developers invariably demonstrate that almost all the most popular Web sites are coded by hand, not with fancy page-building systems

A development company that I occasionally help with online design recently sent me a plea because they had encountered this inconsistency in browser presentation:

Dave, Help! Everything looks different in the different browsers!! This is turning out to be a nightmare! How much effect do different browsers have on the appearance of the site? My customer is using AOL and from the e-mail she sent

me, things are a mess When I look at the site, it pretty much is ok There are a few modifications to make - font, bold - but what’s going on?

That’s one of the greatest frustrations for all Web site designers: Not only do different versions

of Web browsers support different versions of HTML and CSS, but the exact formatting that results from a given HTML tag or CSS style varies by Web browser, too It’s why the mantra

of all good Web designers is “test, test, test.”

In fact, if you’re going to get serious about Web development, I would suggest that you con­sider a setup like I have: Before you officially say that you’re done with a project, check all the pages with the two most recent major releases of the two biggest Web browsers on both a Mac and a Windows system (That’s a total of eight different browsers Right now, I have the two most recent versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape loaded on both of my computers.)

xiii

Preface

Text Conventions Used in This Book

Stuff I ask you to type appears in bold, like this: something you actually type I also use bold

in some lines of HTML source code to point out the specific tag or attribute that the discus­sion is focusing on

Filenames, directories, URLs, and names of machines on the Net appear in a special type­face, like this: http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/html/Guest_Book.html

HTML-formatted source code appears in that same special typeface, but on separate lines, like this:

<html>

<title>How to Create Cool Web Sites</title>

<img src=”intro.gif” alt=”How To Create Cool Web Sites” />

Icons Used to Help You Navigate

I use the following icons to help you find your way around the text and to point out important additional information that I want to emphasize

This icon points out some expert tricks and techniques that can help you work

tip more efficiently

Pay attention to this icon It alerts you to possible pitfalls and may help you avoid

caution trouble

Check out this icon for additional details that deserve special attention and may

note help you work better in the long term

Jump to the chapters elsewhere in the book that this icon points you to You’re

x-ref bound to run into some good information or more details about the topic at hand

This icon points you to helpful information or samples on the companion Web site

on the that accompanies this book (http://www.intuitive.com/coolsites/) or to sites

web elsewhere on the Net

Preface

xiv

Who Should Read This Book?

You can use this book to learn HTML, XHTML, CSS, and the techniques needed to create cool Web sites All you need is a simple text editor, such as Notepad (which comes with Windows) or TextEdit (which is part of the Macintosh operating system), and a Web browser

If you’re already online and have a Web browser installed on your computer, you can easily explore all the examples in this book by going to this book’s accompanying Web site at

http://www.intuitive.com/coolsites/

What’s on the Companion Web Site?

What would a Web book be without a companion Web site? The Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS Web site can be found at http://www.intuitive.com/ coolsites/ The site contains every single example in the book, pointers to every site men­tioned, the extended table of contents for the book, and a sample chapter for your reading pleasure In addition, you’ll find an errata page in case any typos or glitches have come to light between when we wrapped up production and when you picked up this book From this site, you can also access my Booktalk weblog, which offers a fun and informal Q&A environ­ment where you can ask me questions about specific issues that might puzzle or confuse you

Be Productive in No Time!

By the time you’re halfway through this book, you’ll be able to whip up the kind of pages you see every day, guaranteed And by the time you finish this book, you’ll know other ways to organize information to make creating Web versions of print material easy You’ll also learn about the nuances of XHTML and the tremendous power and capabilities that Cascading Style Sheets add to the equation, as well as why it’s crazy not to include at least rudimentary CSS elements in your everyday site development work

Want to contact the author? Send e-mail to taylor@intuitive.com or visit my home page

on the Web at http://www.intuitive.com/

If you’re ready, let’s go!

No writing project can be completed while the author is locked in a room, although if there’s a good Net connection, we can probably negotiate something! Seriously, a num­ber of Internet folk have proven invaluable as I’ve written the different editions of this book— some for their direct help and others for simply having produced some wickedly cool Web pages that inspired me when things were moving a bit slowly

Special thanks go to my many students at The University of Phoenix Online and elsewhere who helped clarify what made sense and what didn’t in the previous editions of the book I also particularly appreciate the continued assistance of the team at Wiley Publishing, includ­ing notably Sharon Cox and Jodi Jensen, and Dreamtech for the technical edit My friends and colleagues John Locke, Bo Leuf, Werner Klauser, Jon Shemitz, Richard Blum, and Jon Trelfa helped keep the content fresh and accurate and helped to continually remind me that there’s more to learn Special thanks also to search engine expert Dan Murray for his help on Google page ranking algorithms

Most of the graphics presented in this book were created in GraphicConverter, a wonderful shareware application for the Macintosh, though I used Adobe Photoshop CS a few times Screen shots were done with MW Snap on the PC and Snapz Pro X on the Macintosh Most of the book was written on my aging Apple Macintosh G4/450 system (I have to admit, I’m a Mac guy at heart), and the Windows work was all done on a 900MHz Pentium III box running Windows XP

Finally, warm hugs to Linda, Ashley, Gareth, Jasmine, Karma, Angel, and, of course, the newest member of my family, Kiana, for ensuring that I took sufficient breaks to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome or any of the other hazards of overly intense typing The time off would be a lot less fun without ya!

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xv

Part I: Building a Wicked Cool Web Page Chapter 1: So What’s All This Web Jazz? 3

What Is the Web Anyway? 3

Linear media 3

Hypermedia 4

Cool spots on the Web 5

Introduction to Internet Explorer 8

Launching Internet Explorer 9

Changing the default page 11

All about URLs 12

URLs to the rescue 12

Reading a URL 13

FTP via URL 14

Anonymous FTP 14

Nonanonymous FTP 15

Ports 15

Using FTP URLs 16

Special characters in URLs 16

E-mail via URL 17

Telnet via URL 17

Usenet news via URL 18

The heart of the Web: HTTP URLs 18

Summary 20

Chapter 2: Building Your First Web Page: HTML Basics 21

Basics of HTML Layout 21

HTML and browsers 22

If you open it, close it 23

Breaking at Paragraphs and Lines 24

Building Your First Web Page 28

Launching your HTML editor 28

Saving your file as HTML 29

1

Contents

xviii

Opening the file in Internet Explorer 31

Improving the HTML and viewing it in the browser 32

Breaking Your Document into Sections 32

Adding a Title to Your Page 34

Adding Footer Material 35

Defining Section Heads 37

Using the Horizontal Rule 40

Introducing XHTML 41

Summary 42

Chapter 3: Presenting Text Attractively 43

First, a Little History 44

Helping Readers Navigate with Bold and Italic 44

Underlining, Monospace, and Other Text Changes 46

Specifying Font Sizes, Colors, and Faces 49

Applying Logical Styles 52

Putting It All Together 54

Summary 56

Chapter 4: Types of CSS 58

Inline CSS 58

One definition, many references 59

Sharing a single style sheet 62

The Components of CSS 62

Classes and IDs 63

Subclasses 64

Adding comments within CSS 65

Compatible style blocks 65

Text Formatting with CSS 66

Bold text 66

Italics 66

Changing Font Family, Size, and Color 67

Typefaces and monospace 67

Changing font size 69

The color of text 70

Additional Neato Text Tricks in CSS 71

Small capitals 71

Stretching or squishing letter spacing 72

Stretching or squishing words 73

Changing line height 73

Text alignment 74

Vertical text alignment 74

Text decorations 75

Changing text case 76

Putting it all together 76

Summary 80

Chapter 6: Putting the

Pointing to Other Web Pages 103Referencing Non-Web Information 106Referencing Internal Documents with Relative URLs 108Organizing a Web Site 109Defining Web Document Jump Targets 113Adding Jump Links to Your Web Pages 114Jumping into organized lists 117Linking to jump targets in external documents 119Changing Link Colors 119Summary 120

Chapter 7: From Dull to Cool by Adding Graphics 121

Image Formats 122Including Images in Web Pages 123Text Alternatives for Text-Based Web Browsers 127Image Alignment Options 128Standard alignment 129More sophisticated alignment 130Background Colors and Graphics 136Where Can You Find Images? 140Creating your own 140Clip art or canned image libraries? 141Scanned or digital photographs 142Working with digital photographs 144Grabbing images off the Net 146Art today 146The shock zone 146But wait! There’s more 147Transparent Colors 147Animated GIF images 149Image-Mapped Graphics 149Building an image map 150