Help me to learn HTML

need advice on furthering my knowledge please

[drewzki1]

I have been teaching myself HTML for around 6 months now and it has become part of my job to maintain and update / improve the company website on a near daily basis. Ofcourse, now I have a fairly good understanding of HTML and practical experience in using it, I feel the need to learn a lot more advanced stuff. Can anyone recomend a particular course / book / (anything else) that will be of use in learning more?
BTW I'm 24 and in Northern England.
Thanks.

[MatthewHSE]

The first thing to add to your HTML knowledge is a solid understanding of CSS. While you're working on that, try to learn everything you can about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Once you have an understanding of these three things, you'll be pretty well-set as far as designing good pages goes and will be able to move on to server-side scripting, etc.

For a good way to learn, the best method I know is to just jump in with both feet and start. Use Firefox with the Web Developer extension for initial development and testing of your pages, and of course, whenever you don't understand something, just ask here! ;)

[andye]

The O'Reilly book on HTML by Musciano & Kennedy has always been a good bet.

best, a.

[JAB Creations]

A good example is always helpful too! I agree with everything others mentioned but sometimes you need a clearcut example of code that works.

XHTML is not very different then HTML only you want to learn CSS as much as possible. Keep all your adjective like tags out of your code and your adjective like attributes in your css file. That way you can change your style for your entire site with a single change to your css.

A good and working example of what you can achieve with this is the themes script that changes the css file being used for styling. This adds the ability to make more then one theme or look for a site. My site does this (home on top menu, then themes on left once in home for the site in my profile here). My example uses a single javascript file so you can for example download an html file (change php extension to html, download the css files, and the javascript file called script-style.js, make sure all the files are in the same folder, and change the file paths. Now you can have a working example on your computer.

You need to validate your code and test it in various browsers. There are ultimately four main browser TYPES.

Gecko - Powers Firefox, Mozilla Suite, Camino, Netscape, Compuserve (aol in disguise), and the MAC version of AOL

KHTML - Konquerer (linux) and Safari (mac)

MSIE - Internet Explorer .. most crumby browsers are based on this)

Opera - Opera is JUST opera thank goodness!

Gecko is the best to render according to the W3C standards, Opera is very close behind, then KHTML engines are fair but still have modest issues, and MSIE totally sucks but can be dealt with if you truly have a burning passion (if you do your code right, bad code will work but screw up in good browsers).

If you code badly or just are learning anyway IE will look fine typically. That's because Microsoft wants to make their own rules. *buzzer* wrong! So you should try to test a page with Firefox first. Make sure you validate your pages including your CSS!

[validator.w3.org...]

Works great and eventually you'll find that 105 errors in example barrels down to about 20 changes in your code (never as bad as you make it in your head).

Once you have a page working in Gecko (Firefox is the Gecko browser I use by default) then test with Opera. Then (if you can) with KHTML). Lastly test with IE.