About HTML
Web design is increasingly being dominated by a set of techniques called
AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML). AJAX allows faster online interactivity, by refreshing part of a Web page after a user selects an option, without reloading the whole HTML page. It's often said that AJAX allows Web applications to behave more like desktop software. AJAX is not covered here.
The rise of AJAX may mean that the mainstream of Web design is moving out of reach of nontechnical users. Even if that's true, the simpler static-page approach using HTML plus CSS is still valid and available to anyone; and AJAX could still turn out to be a fad.
- What this resource will do for you: help you avoid common mistakes made by Web authors, provide tips and tricks to improve the quality and usability of your site, and point you at techniques that will save you time while working on it.
- What this resource won't do for you is take the place of good comprehensive HTML and CSS references, that cover all the nuts-and-bolts details.
- Web design; look before you leap is about selecting and implementing Web publishing tools and technologies. If your organization already has external and intranet Web content working, and you're just being asked to author some pages, these software choices have probably already been made for you. This page may still help you understand the choices made by your organization.
- WYSIWYG HTML generators is about user-friendly software for writing and maintaining Web pages, including
Dreamweaver. When you write Web content, you will most likely either be using one of these, or sending draft Word files to someone who is.
- Implementing CSS is an introduction to how to make Cascading Style Sheets work for you.
- Web content for business people is about nuts-and-bolts details of writing Web content.
- Graphics for Web pages covers details of preparing Web graphics. If you're lucky, a "Web graphics guru" may be part of your organization's support for page authors.
- Web stuff for computer geeks covers details of interest to "propeller-heads" who want to know how everything works.
- HTML links cites some Internet resources relevant to Web publishing, including links for several of what I think are the most important books on Web design.
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- Webmaster
- Web programmers and designers responsible for choices of tools and technologies to be used for Web publishing within an organization, and for support of page authors.
- Page author
- An ordinary business person asked to author some Web publishing content, most often for the intranet, or possibly for the external Web site.
- User
- The hypothetical reader of Web content, who visits pages looking for particular useful information, and who must be expected to make some personal choices about formatting and presentation of Web pages they read.
- External Web site
- The public Internet Web presence of your organization; Web pages that can be read by anyone with access to the global Internet, including your customers and your competitors.
- Intranet*
- Internal Web pages available only to company employees, and perhaps contractors. In theory, at least, used as a functional means of communication by everyone in your organization. Not available to general outside Internet users.
- Firewall
- Special security software, often running on a special dedicated server computer, which monitors traffic between a private corporate network and the global Internet, to prevent illicit access to private information.
- Extranet*
- Probably not discussed much in these pages; a special case in which the private intranets of corporate partners are linked together via a secure gateway, so that employees of company A can read intranet pages of company B, and vice versa.
- VPN
- Virtual private network; sort of a more-general case of an extranet, allowing outside sales people and other "road warriors" to connect to the private corporate network as though they were inside the firewall, using a secure, encrypted Internet connection.
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