HTML
resources

• Editors, IDE, WCMS
• Validation, link checkers, other software
• CSS, graphics, JavaScript, books

I used to have about a dozen pages here, with a lot of how-to discussion on Web publishing. Almost nobody is doing it the way I and some others think it should be done, with emphasis on usability, readability, speed, fluid text, clean code, and open standards. It seems to me most people getting paid to do Web stuff today contrive to make a simple thing very complicated.

Since nobody seemed to be listening to me, I dumped all that exposition, and now I just point to resources. See my browsers page under Net software for information on Web browsers and layout engines.

What seems to be thought cool now is extremely busy-looking pages, with seventeen other things crammed in besides what you came for, sometimes to the point that you can't find what you came for, and all done in fonts teeny enough to give you a headache in about thirty seconds.

World Wide Web Consortium ("W3C") http://www.w3.org/

The standards forum for the Web, since October 1994.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

A "Column on Web Usability." This is far and away the best online resource on Web design I know of. He's been writing a column every couple of weeks since 1996, and nearly all of them still hold up.

Some Alertbox articles:
• Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design (1996)
• Why Frames Suck (1996) Just Say No
• The Need for Speed (1997) We should all write Web code that loads fast.
• Usability 101 (2003)
• Screen Resolution and Page Layout (2006)
• Usability in the Movies, Top 10 Bloopers (2006) Examples of stupid stuff Hollywood does when movie and TV characters use computers. Projects mentioned include Minority Report, 24, Jurassic Park, Star Trek.
• Life-Long Computer Skills (2007) that won't become obsolete with new software versions.
• Does User Annoyance Matter? (2007)
• Site Map Usability (2008)
• Website Response Times (2010) refers to the 1997 article linked above, and affirms that speed is still relevant in the age of broadband, contrary to some Web designers' desire to believe otherwise.

thesitewizard.com http://www.thesitewizard.com/
thefreecountry.com http://www.thefreecountry.com/

Web publishing resources courtesy of Christopher Heng (both sites).

Web Pages That Suck http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/

"Learn good Web design by looking at bad Web design," and hope you don't find your own site featured!

top

Death of a Meta Tag http://searchenginewatch.com/2165061
An End to Meta Tags http://www.traffick.com/article.asp?aID=102

META keyword and description tags in the page header were big for a while in the late 1990s, but were heavily abused and spammed; they became pretty much ignored by modern search engines.

Wikipedia: List of XML and HTML character entity references

Character entities allow you to use international characters, scientific and mathematical symbols, and other non-keyboard characters, and also to unambiguously use characters in your text like quote marks, <, and > that have special meaning in XML/HTML, with no chance of their being misinterpreted by browsers.

A few words about PDF abuse

Publishing PDF files on the Web is not always a good idea. Organizations often prepare documents for publication in printed form first, and then later want to publish the same information online. It seems at first glance a plausible and zero-cost option to just convert the word-processor document to PDF format, and put a link to the PDF file on the Web site; and it is true that nearly everyone has PDF reader capability on their computers, usually as a native OS service these days.

For best results, only things like forms, that are meant to be printed out and used exclusively on actual paper made from trees, should be put online in PDF format. For anything that will sometimes be read online and sometimes printed out, such as software documentation, one might want to offer both PDF and HTML versions. Anything that's primarily to be used online, that will rarely if ever be printed, should definitely be set up in HTML.

Bumper sticker:
Don't steal, the government
hates competition.

Since I'm writing this in April, when lots of us Yanks are freaking out about our tax returns, I've recently seen excellent examples, courtesy of the IRS: their basic tax-return Forms 1040, 1040A, and 1040EZ, and associated instructions, published as paper booklets.

The IRS Website also offers the tax forms and instructions in the form of PDF files:

There could have been HTML versions of the instructions I didn't find, but I doubt it. The tax forms and instructions cross-reference each other a lot by page number, and they need to preserve those references.

• For the tax form itself this is admirable use of PDF format. If you're filing on paper rather than electronically, obviously you need the tax form on paper, whether printed out or fetched from the local federal building. Actually the IRS does a very nice job of it, the printed PDF version looks just like the distributed form, especially if you have duplex printing available (both sides) as one often does at the library for cost-control reasons.
• I only found the tax-form instructions online in PDF format. Probably most people will print those out too, to refer to them more handily while sweating over their return. People without printers, or at public libraries where they don't want to use up large amounts of the library's paper, might want to refer to those instructions on-screen. The IRS tax-form instructions are in a two-colum format that's easy to read when printed out, but is awkward on a computer display.

The worst thing about making people read online content in PDF format is it confuses the heck out of unsophisticated Internet users. The whole interface and controls change suddenly, for no apparent reason. They might just turn off the computer and go read a comic book. It's rather annoying even for a savvy user who knows exactly what's happening.

top

When there's a valid reason to offer PDF files (such as our friend Form 1040) it needs to be clear to the user, before he clicks on it, that the link leads to a PDF file. All it really needs is "PDF" in parentheses right beside the link. There's been some experimenting with various glyphs for PDFs, pictures, video clips, and also to distinguish between internal and external hyperlinks, but no consistent usage has emerged that I can see.