Liz's Top 5 HTML Questions (and Answers) -- December 3, 1999
1. Why doesn't my page look the same in Explorer as in Netscape?
The Explorer-Netscape struggle is probably the most vexing problem on
the Web. You work hard designing a great page, you test it on your browser,
you upload it to your server, and five minutes later your first visitor
complains that they can't see anything, or that what they see is not what
they're supposed to see. What went wrong? The three common culprits are
tables, frames, and style sheets. Solving table and frameset problems
is easy: be sure to use a closing </TABLE> or </FRAMESET>
tag for each opening one that you code. Style sheets are trickier--the
problem is that neither browser supports style sheets completely. The
solution is to restrict your use of style sheets to those elements that
both browsers get.
2. What happened to my images? Or, sometimes, why don't my links work?
If you get little red x's or the Question mark icon instead of your images,
or if your links don't go where they're supposed to, you've probably got
problems with URLs, or Uniform Resource Locators, which is just a fancy
name for an address. Each and every file (including HTML pages, images,
sounds, video, and anything else you have on your page) has a unique address
on the Web. The URL is made up of a path and a filename. The path describes
exactly where the file is on the server (not your local hard disk!)...and
can either be an absolute address (starting from the root directory, go
in the Web directory, and then in the Site directory and get the xyz file),
or a relative address (it's the xyz file that's in this same directory).
In general, use relative addresses for all the files on your server and
use absolute addresses to link to files on other servers. The second half
of the problem is getting the address exactly right--matching upper and
lower case letters, and spelling everything right. Finally, make sure
you upload the file where you say it will be.
3. How do I get a link to appear in a particular frame? How do I get
rid of a frame once it exists?
Frames are useless without targets. A target describes where a link should
appear--either in the same frame that holds the link (default), in some
other named frame (TARGET="frame-name"), in the entire window (TARGET=_top>,
in the parent frameset of a nested set (TARGET=_parent), or in an entirely
new window (TARGET=_blank). The pure-HTML way to change more than one
frame with just one link is to point to a special frameset that specifies
two or more new source files. No JavaScript required.
4. What does deprecated mean? Can I still use deprecated tags?
"Deprecated" means that the World Wide Web
Consortium wants to eliminate the tag from the official specifications
but realizes that most people still rely on the tag. Instead of immediately
making the tag obsolete, they label the tag "deprecated" as an intermediate
step. In other words, the W3C discourages the use of deprecated tags,
but such tags remain a part of the official HTML standard. Theoretically,
at some point in the future, the tags will become obsolete and will no
longer be an official part of HTML. Frankly, I don't think that day will
come any day soon. It is my humble opinion that style-related HTML tags
will continue to be supported by all browsers for many years to come.
There are just too many Web pages out there that already use them for
any browser manufacturer to thumb its nose at--no matter what the W3C
might want in a perfect world. Why does the W3C care about such things?
They want HTML to be efficient, and they'd like to separate form from
content. Using style sheets to format a Web site fulfills both objectives.
The only problem is that style sheets are a lot more work than a simple
<FONT> tag.
5. Are your cats really as cute in person as they are in your book and
on your Web
site ? And what is Catalan
anyway?
One of the things I like best about getting e-mail from satisfied readers
is hearing about their cats. I'm amazed at how many people go to see my
cats, read my descriptions of them, and then write to me to share their
stories about their own feline companions (which I love to read!). I used
to worry that dog people wouldn't like my book because of the marked preference
(and silliness) I show in my examples, but I realized that that sort of
misses the point. It's not the cats that are important (though they really
are beautiful), it's just that they're real, and they make the examples
work. The same with Catalan, which really is its own language--as different
from Spanish as French or Portuguese--spoken by some six million people,
mostly in the Northeast of Spain (including Barcelona), but also in the
Southeast of France, the Balearic Islands, and one little town on Sardinia
in Italy (really!).