I have an interest in HTML but don’t know beans about it.  Can someone put me onto a tutoral suitable for use by a beginner in this field? 

Thanks in advance

George

Hey Dummy (no pun intended of course )

I started out using geocities, they help you start out by by helping you build the page to start out.

Then once I got the hang of that, I started messing around with the “advanced editor” and learning the codes. During this second stage, I got a couple books “Creating Web Pages for Dummies” in the IDG series and “Using HTML”

I’d recomend getting the IDG book, it *still* proves itself useful when I need a quick hint of how to do something quick! I’d also check out http://www.htmlgoodies.com/ they have some great tutorials and whatnot for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as some other fun stuff.

hope this helps!
-Louie

LOu13, I bookmarked the URL.  It looks pretty complete and like a good place to start.  Thank you very much for the reply.

George

No problem! Glad to help!

Hint: if you get stuck, this forum is a good place to ask questions
-Louie

Everything I know I learned from Zeldman . Know him. Love him. Drink the orange Kool-Aid.

Gina, the Zeldman site is a good one.  Thanks for the reply.

George

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Dummy on 2002-01-26 15:57 ]</font>

oooh, those look like interesting sites.  i have bookmarked them.  i will be doing webpage support at work soon, and every little bit of info helps.

thank you.

Hotwired’s Webmonkey is a good place for noobs and old hands alike.  It’s got how-tos and tutorials, and a bunch of quickie reference pages.

You know, the View -> Source command is a great way to learn, too. It’s saved my bacon a couple times, not to mention my pork chops.

Yeah, View Source is always how I stole, er, learned in the early days.   No, really, if you like a site design, just looking at its source is a reasonable way to see how it was done in most cases.  Sometimes the pages you see are a result of automatic generation from other processes, though.

When I was first learning how to write HTML I picked up the basic ideas (generally how the code works, learning about the concepts of opening and closing tags, etc.) from a magazine article or two. Later, I learned most of the rest of what I know by viewing the source of sites whose layouts I found interesting.  Of course, this is harder and harder these days.  A few years ago things were simpler, but now pages are filled with stylesheets, JavaScript, and other things that could slow down the learning process for a beginner.

One suggestion I have would be obtaining a simple graphical HTML editor (like the Composer feature in Netscape) and mess around with it.  Then view the source of what you have made to see how it actually works.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: David Nelson on 2002-02-02 03:13 ]</font>

more view->source = more better

On 2002-02-02 03:10, David Nelson wrote:

One suggestion I have would be obtaining a simple graphical HTML editor (like the Composer feature in Netscape) and mess around with it.  Then view the source of what you have made to see how it actually works.

Yes, but realize that these GUI composers are going to generate a lot of useless tags, that can be left out (the most obvious being meta, made by some-fancy-gui-editor)

I hate editing pages that were created in one of these things.  esp. the MS crap that generates a ton of header info “just in case” it might need it! 

sorry, I’ll go back to playing with emacs now. 

Ohh yeah, and <!—MMEditable Blah Blah Blah Hooey—>.  Pain in the patsy.

I would still not recommend view->source to anyone but the faint hearted, unless you’re looking at something simple, or until you know a few basics.  Looking at the source this page generates, for example, is full of table cells for layout and so forth, and that’s a touch confusing unless you know what they’re doing.

This is not to say that you can’t try.   Also, this layout isn’t overly complex (as compared to, say, layers and dhtml and so on).  it’s just a lot of mess to hack through.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Raena on 2002-02-03 20:50 ]</font>

I “grew up” on Laura Lemay.  Her HTML 3.2 book was OUTSTANDING!  I think her principles and approach are outstanding.  For instance, she went off ona minor rant about “click here for blah blah blah” and how stupid it is to say that.  You’ll notice you NEVER see that at TMO.  Links are worked into the sentence structure.

In any event, I recommend anything she has written for HTML.

Ah… back when I was learning HTML (1994) the ONLY option I found was to do a “View Source” on pages I liked and dissect the code to figure out how they were putting them together.

Now it is so much easier.  I commend you for wanting to actually learn HTML though, instead of just relying on a mediocre WYSIWYG tool (and so far, I think they’re ALL mediocre).

Someone else suggested Webmonkey and I’d like to second that.  If you’re interested in getting a book, I also recommend the latest edition of “HTML: A Visual QuickStart Guide” from Peachpit Press.

Oh, and one more thing… please do the world a favor and swear right now that you will NEVER use the “Save as HTML” (or “Save as Web Page”) option in Microsoft Word!  Please!!!
_________________
Scott (room34)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: room34 on 2002-03-19 13:47 ]</font>

Oh you better believe it.

I verbally flogged the last guy who did that.  I believe the opening words to the rant were “Listen, cock…”