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- USING THE BASE COMMAND
October 22, 1996 - By Shawn D. Hogan - One of the "new" features in HTML 3.0 is the ability to utilize frames. Frame have many useful functions. One way to better control which frame a link is opened in, is the use of the TARGET command. For example, to open a document named news.html in a frame named Main, you could do something along these lines:
<A HREF="news.html" TARGET="Main">Click here for news</A>
If you want to set the default target frame to Main, you can insert the following line into the beginning of your HTML document:
<BASE TARGET="Main">
- USING THE NOWRAP COMMAND
July 15, 1996 - By Shawn D. Hogan - I was working on a web site the other day, when I came across a problem. I developed a layout using tables, which listed items and then depending on which item it was, had a
icon on the end of it. What I found, was that in some browsers, it would wrap the icon to the next line, thus giving it a horrible look.By adding the NOWRAP tab into the TD tag, you are able to force the browser not to wrap those particular lines.
An example of this is: (this happens to be an exact duplicate of the fix to my problem)
<TABLE CELLSPACING=10><TR><TD NOWRAP>
- USING ASCII CHARACTERS
June 12, 1996 - By Shawn D. Hogan - I recently wrote an HTML tip that showed examples of HTML tags, including the greater than and less than sign. A few people asked how I did that on a web page, so here is the answer.
Since HTML tags start with the less than sign, you cannot include that character in your web page as anything except a tag. A simple way to get around it is to use the &#xxx; tag. (The xxx being the ASCII code of the character you wish to display.
For example: To display <BODY> on your web site, you would need to use the following HTML code:
<BODY>
This of course works for all characters, the 60 & 62 are simply the ASCII codes of the < & > characters.
Note: Some browsers support character tags (such as < for the less than sign), but it's recommended that you use the numeric representation, as all browsers should support these.
- IMAGE FILES & SOFTWARE VARIATIONS
June 11, 1996 - By Shawn D. Hogan - The Internet uses two major image types, JPG and GIF. When creating images for your web site, it is always a good idea to use QUALITY image software, as the software out there varies tremendously.
The end result should be the highest quality with the smallest size possible.
For the quality aspect of the picture, I can't recommend Adobe Photoshop enough. In addition to the many filters it comes with, it has a few tools which are very useful, such as the ability to pick the number of colors you want to reduce your picture to. Photoshop reduces colors in a picture with enough quality that usually 1/3 of the colors are more than enough. If you are saving it as a JPG, you don't need to go any farther. You now have your end result.
If you decide to go with the GIF format (best for line-art and most logos), it's a good idea to run it through a program with a better compression scheme (one that allows any number of colors to be used, instead of the standard 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256). Personally I use Giffer, but there are other ones out there. I can run my picture through Giffer without ANY quality loss and usually end up with a 40-80% smaller file. A great feature of the GIF format (at least the 89A version), is the ability to make transparent colors. Which is handy, especially when you are using backgrounds on your web site.
Note: Technically this isn't an HTML tip, but since images are a huge part of the web, I've included it here anyway.
- ENTERING SUBJECT USING MAILTO
June 6, 1996 - By Shawn D. Hogan - Most people are aware of the MAILTO tag in HTML, which allows you to send mail to a particular address by clicking on a link. What many people do not realize is that by adding a subject to it, you can have the mail automatically come up with the default subject that you select. A standard mailto link will look like this:
<A HREF="mailto:shawn@digitalpoint.com">
You can give the mail a subject of "Response" by changing it slightly to look like this:
<A HREF="mailto:shawn@digitalpoint.com?subject=Response">
- INCREASING BROWSER SPEED
May 31, 1996 - By Shawn D. Hogan - By using Netscape or some other advanced browser, you have the ability to create a thumbnail and a full-sized picture by using a single file. The standard HTML tag for a picture file named shawn.jpg, would be:
- <IMG SRC="shawn.jpg">
By adding the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes, you can tell the browser the picture size before it tries to load it. Thus, eliminating the pause that the browser encounters while trying to figure out the size of the picture. As an example, you might have a 100x100 picture, and use the following HTML tag:
<IMG SRC="shawn.jpg" WIDTH=100 HEIGHT=100>
You can also use these attributes to scale pictures. If you enter a WIDTH and HEIGHT that does not match the source file, your browser will scale the pictures to that size. Makes it great when you have multi sizes of the same picture. When scaling, the pictures will obviously look better if you are scaling from larger to smaller. Do not use this to replace separate thumbnails though, as the scaled pictures take just as long to load as the full-sized one.
- <IMG SRC="shawn.jpg">
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