My name is Maksimilijan and I’m new to the forums. I read ‘‘How to be a Great Online Community Member’’ article and I feel positive about asking some questions.
That’s why I’m here - to gain knowledge and to share it.
So… I’m interested in mastering (X)HTML before moving to CSS. This is my problem: I don’t have enough resources to learn from. I’m interested in buying ‘‘The Ultimate HTML Refrence’’ and learn every single tag separately. Would it be a smart choice for beginner like me?
Then I would like to learn about standards. I know that I must follow certain standards in order to build quality websites. Any advice here?
Hi Maksimilijan (I had to copy and paste this) welcome to Sitepoint forums. I think that the title you’re referring to is a good one just like many other titles here on SPF. I hope you enjoy your time
One of the problems with that book is that about 2/3 of the tags and attributes it lists are dead and should be long gone (but are in many cases unfortunately still used by those who haven’t learnt HTML properly). They are listed so that you can know what they are supposed to do so you can work out what the correct tags are to replace them with when updating outdated HTML to the current standards. The book doesn’t really make it as clear as it could which of the tags and attributes are the ones that are currently a part of HTML.
You should do fine with that book provided that you don’t try to learn every tag and instead just learn those that are a part of HTML 4 strict. The problem is that the book lists which version of HTML introduced each tag and attribute but not whether they are still current in HTML 4 so you’d need a separate list of what tags and attributes are still a part of HTML to know what parts of the book are worth learning.
One way to check that you are not using dead tags or attributes in your HTML is to make sure you use the correct doctype at the start of the HTML
w3schools is not being kept up to date (which doesn’t matter as far as the list of 1997 HTML 4 standard tags are concerned but most of the rest of that web site covers the 20th century way of doing things and is therefore mainly useful as a historical reference - so you shouldn’t get too used to relying on what those two guys had to say about things).
The w3c.org web site covers the actual standards if you really need to refer back to the actual standard docs themselves (rather hard to read and not usually necessary). There is no connection between the W3C site run by the standards organisation and the w3schools site run by two guys in their spare time.
I’d choose Gary’s ‘bedtime reading’ list if you want to learn about the elements, i.e. the actual technical recommendations although they are not designed as a tutorial. But they are extremely well-written and once you understand them properly you’ll begin to have a solid grasp of markup.
Though like was mentioned you also need to practice coding and read around the topics to actually appreciate how things are effected.
Thank you!