Mad Dog's Final Rants

Okay, now you know enough to be dangerous. Enjoy! Here are a few miscellaneous topics you ought to be aware of

Accessibility

Many web designers are interested in making their pages accessible to specialized Braille and speech display browsers. Here are a few ideas to improve the accessibility of your pages:

Include an informative text description in the ALT= attribute of each <IMG> tag for speech devices to read. End the text with a period so speech devices don't get confused. (The ALT attribute is a required part of the <IMG> tag in HTML 4.)
Provide text transcripts of audio clips for hearing-impaired visitors.
Provide linked captions along with linked images.
Provide text links as alternatives to imagemaps.
Design your tables so they are logical when read sequentially.
Don't use the <BLINK> tag; it's not only tacky, it also confuses Braille and speech displays.

Test your code

In some ways HTML standards are becoming stricter, so that future browsers are likely to be less tolerant of sloppy code than current browsers. You may be able to get away with overlapping tags such as <PRE>text being formatted</PRE>now, but don't count on it in the future. Similarly, some tags that don't currently require closing elements such as , <LI> and <TD> are likely to require them in the future. Under HTML 4 the  tag will manage block formatting using a defined style, and switching style will require a closing  tag. Inclusion of closing </LI> and </TD> tags in lists and tables can prevent some current browsers from getting confused. Including these closing tags can't hurt.

You can test your HTML code with any of several free code validation services such as WebSite Garage at www.websitegarage.comor Net Mechanic www.netmechanic.com. You can also test your code for HTML 4 compliance with W3C's validator at validator.w3.org.

Meta tags

We haven't discussed <META> tags before, but they're often worth including in the <HEAD> section of your page. Here are some typical uses:

To automatically redirect a client to another URL after 3 seconds:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="3
URL=http://www.newserver.com/~mad_dog/newversion.html">

(Note that the URL is included within the quoted CONTENT string and doesn't get its own quotes.)

Meta tags can tell the client how to handle the file...

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

...or send information to the client...

<META NAME="author" CONTENT="Mad Dog Muldoon">
<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="1999-2000, M.D. Muldoon.
If you copy this I will hunt you down and...">

...or feed keywords to search engines

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="taxidermy, trepanning,
skull surgery, do-it-yourself autopsy">

Many HTML editors like to add their own <META> tags taking credit for helping you with your web pages:

<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Mozilla/4.04 [en] (Win95; I) [Netscape]">

Final rants:
Do lots of web-surfing and study what makes good pages effective. If you see a page you like, view the source HTML behind it.
I would never suggest that you steal images off of other web pages by clicking on them with your right mouse button and selecting "Save Image As..."
Make sure your page performs well on various browsers. Neither Netscape Navigator nor Internet Explorer are fully compliant with HTML 4, and each supports some tags, attributes and functions the other won't.
Check your page at various display resolutions, and design for the lowest common denominator, a 640x480 display. Lots of people are still using them.
Check your images on an 8-bit display too. That beautiful JPEG with millions of subtle colors may not look so hot when it's re-paletted to 256 colors by a client browser.
Try to keep your pages small, so they don't need scrollbars. Horizontal scrollbars are particularly obnoxious. It's better to link multiple fast-loading pages to each other than stuff everything into one slow-loading page.
Be considerate of clients with slow (modem) connections. Try to keep image files small. A file's download time increases exponentially with its size, so two 50KB images will usually load faster than one 100K image. Slow image downloads will make your visitors lose patience and surf somewhere else. You can reduce wait time for image downloads by using highest acceptable JPEG compression, smaller palettes, pre-loadimg images, building big images from tiled pieces in tables ....
Keep it simple. Making great-looking web-pages with simple tools is a creative challenge. You don't need to lard up your pages with all the latest fads. Whenever some new web capability (e.g., frames) gets introduced, some people inevitably overdo it, and their pages soon look dumb and pretentious. A good source of advice for what not to do is www.webpagesthatsuck.com.
Keep experimenting. Learn some Javascript. Get regular exercise and remember to floss. Don't run in the house with scissors.