At 09:48 PM 7/21/04 -0700, Linda wrote: > Now all > I have to do is graduate to Front Page or something (any suggestions - > instructions?) and make a real site. With pages that interact more and >thumbnails that super-size and everything!
By far the easiest way to maintain a Web page is by hand -- with a web-writing program, you have to go around robin hood's barn trying to trick it into doing what you want, or something at least acceptable, well, I'll just change my mind as to what I can accept. And automatic programs write such sloppy, badly-formatted code that nothing human can read it, so you can't go in and hand-correct the capitalization in a broken link. (And the capitalization is wrong because the HTML-writing program "corrected" the capitals in the filespec you typed into it's "make link" field.) Everything you need to know can be written on one letter-sized sheet of paper. _HTML for the World Wide Web_ has a good introduction; I think the author is Elizabeth Castro. Thumbnails, by the way, are easy: you just store two image files: Load the file you want to use into a graphics-editor such as L-View and resize it. It's probably a good idea to select a standard width and let the height be what it will -- but then I put my thumbnails one under the other; if you line them up side by side, it would be better to choose a standard height and let the width be what it will. Or you could crop them to a standard shape before resizing. Write down the new size, so you can include it in the link. Pages load a *lot* faster if the browser knows how much space to allow for the illos before it loads them. Now you write a link to your big picture. It will look something like this: <a href="FLY.HTM"> <img SRC="RUFFGIF/F.GIF" ALT="F" height=30 width=15>ly-Stitch Alphabet</a>: A quick way to write on textiles with a needle The stuff between the first pair of angle brackets tells the browser what file to load when the link is clicked, in this case a file named "FLY.HTM". The stuff between this and the </a> is the link that you click on. The "a" in the first set of angle brackets says that you are starting a link, the </a> says that you are finished. (Most codes make more sense than "a" for "start link".) The next pair of angle brackets tell the browser to put an image on the page. Since it is between "<a>" and </a>, it will be marked as a link. "img SRC=" is short for "Image Source is". This code says "I want an image here, and here is where you get it." "RUFFGIF" is the name of the subdirectory where the image is. "F.GIF" is the name I gave to my thumbnail. (I cropped an image from FLY.HTM down to the letter "F", then reduced it to thumbnail size.) ALT="F" tells the browser that if for some reason it can't load the image, it is to put the text "F" in the empty frame. It is extremely rude to use an image without providing alternate text, even if the image is purely ornamental and doesn't convey information -- without the alt text, the reader who can't get the image doesn't *know* that the image doesn't change the meaning of the words he can see. Here, the alt text is very important, because I've used the image as the first letter in the first word of my description of what you'll get if you click the link. "height=30 width=15" tells the browser how much space to reserve for the image, which allows it to display the text after the image while the image is still loading. "ly-Stitch Alphabet" -- words which will also be part of the link. (Either the words or the image could be omitted and still make a valid link. Eliminate both, and there is nothing to click.) When combined with the image, this says "Fly-Stitch Alphabet" -- the name of the page you'll get when you click on the link. ": A quick way to write on textiles with a needle" -- the text continues. In this case, it's a description of the file you'll get if you click the link. " " codes a non-breaking space. To allow you to format your source code for easy reading, browsers put only one space between words, no matter how many spaces and line breaks you may type. To force it to put two spaces after the colon, I inserted a non-breaking space, which, as far as the browser is concerned, a letter. The intended use of is to prevent a phrase from being divided at the end of a line, but it's used mostly for making browsers notice white space. How can I remember all this? I don't! When I want to insert a link, I find a similar link that's already working, copy it, paste it into the new location, and edit it. -- Joy Beeson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/LINKS/KITTEN.HTM west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where we aren't supposed to get any more thunderstorms for a while. To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
