2004-04-19

  • a word of advice, part V:


    learn, and then learn some more.


    in case you haven't noticed, i haven't been around too much lately... very busy with a lot of projects. for those of you asking questions about how to do things, i think it's awesome that you want to know, and i wish i had more time to help out right now. things are still super-busy with the new job, and i have a couple of other projects i'm working on (see send us your balls as an example).


    one, if you want to know more about css and the box model hack (which can be used for skinnable sites), go to glish. you'll see exactly where i got a lot of the markup for the skins i have in the gallery... there's also a list apart, which has some really good articles on web design in general. i would still recommend webmonkey, but they're not so much there anymore... check out w3schools, and get info on almost any tag you can think of...


    then there's the way to learn as a lot of us did... play. just play. right-click on your page and go to "View Source" (make sure it's your public page if you're skinned), and save it to a folder on your own system. open it up in your favorite editor - mine's textpad, which has syntax highlighting; or vim, which is another crowd favorite - and look at what you've got. don't rely on a wysiwyg (like frontpage or even dreamweaver or homesite) to do all the work for you. be the man (or woman) behind the curtain, play with the code, and make it do what you want, not what some application thinks.


    when you're finished, you can run it through a validator which will check the code for you to make sure it follows the standards... the ones that the world wide web consortium (aka the w3c) set are what browsers should follow (IE doesn't do a very good job at this, especially with style sheets - try mozilla). try this for html/xhtml, and this for css... there are others listed on the html validator and a lot more outside the w3c, if you want to look for them too.


    just to be clear, this doesn't mean that i'm not still here to help, and you can still ask me and others around here if you run into a problem... i just don't want you to have to wait any longer than you need to if you can't get something to look right. thanks for reading, and have a good one.

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