Archive for July, 2006

Advanced HTML Class Beginning Next Week

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

I will be teaching an Advanced HTML online for free beginning 7/31/06. You can join the Yahoo group where the classes will be taught here We will spend a lot of our time discussing tables and forms but we will touch on other advanced topics such as frames, image maps, javascript, and more.

If you, or someone you know is interested in participating, please sign up soon!

Redirecting a Web Page

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

If you want to send your visitor to another web page without the user clicking on a link, there’s an easy way to do with a very small php script.

Of course, your server will need to allow you to use php code. If you are a Promised Land Services customer, then your website has php access by default.

Let’s say that I have a page on my Sonrises site that I want to redirect my visitors to my Promised Land Services site.

The page on my Sonrises site is named pls.php - so the URL would be http://sonrises.com/pls.php

The .php is necessary on the end instead of .html.

This doesn’t mean you can’t use HTML code inside the page, you can have both HTML code and php code in the same web page. The server will first translate the php code and then send the resulting HTML code to your browser. In other words, php code dynamically creates HTML code to be sent to the browser.

In this case, the php code redirects the user to my Promised Land web site. The only php code needed for this is:

The at the end tells the preprocessor that the php code is finished. The code in between will transfer the browser to http://promised-land-services.com.

It’s THAT easy!

Are End Tags Necessary in HTML?

Tuesday, July 4th, 2006

This was a question that I was asked by someone in one of my HTML classes. I thought it might help someone else as well.

Question: Is the </p> necessary.

Answer: It depends on what you are doing. ;)

eBay’s editor tends to either ignore certain tags or just not care whether the ending tags are there or not. Either eBay’s editor tries to help you out by adding the ending tags for you, or they just ignore them altogether. I’m not sure which.

All browsers are written a little differently and handle your HTML code a little differently. BUT, there is an HTML standard - a set of rules that define HTML - and most browsers stick to this standard. Many browsers are more lenient about the rules and don’t require the ending tags. But, other browsers may require the ending tags.

If you are building a website that could possibly be visited by anyone from anywhere using any kind of browser, then you want to make sure that you stick as close as possible to the rules so that ALL browsers will work as you expect when you write the code. If you leave off an ending tag and the users browser expects an ending tag, your web page could end up looking really strange.

So, for eBay, it probably doesn’t matter right now. Later, if eBay changes it’s editor, it may become an issue. For websites, I always recommend that you stick as close to the rules as possible. Not only because of different browsers accessing your sites, but because of the search engines that visit your sites as well. Google is a stickler for obeying the rules and whether or not your site has correct HTML code may be a big factor in how well your site ranks for your chosen keywords.

You can find the standards website here:

http://www.w3.org