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Hello,I'm completely new to programming (as in I started learning html yesterday). Like the site, was looking for a good free tutorial, and voilà! To start with I just wanted to be sure I'm right to begin with html? Or should I learn it parallel to something else such as CSS? (I was browsing the forum and saw someone suggest this).Just to add some context, I'm very determined and will be trying to average 3-4 hours of study a day. I spent 6 years working in advertising, then the last 4 years teaching business English to middle and upper management in eastern Europe. I'm hoping that I'll become proficient enough at programming that I can combine it with the skills I've learnt over the last 10 years.I want to learn as quickly as possible, but languages are not something that come naturally to me (ironic considering my job) so I'll probably be asking what you might consider stupid questions to begin with, if you have no patience (or are patronising/condescending etc lol) just ignore my posts. :) Otherwise, any help will be greatly appreciated.Cheers, TCS

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The line breaks and extra spaces don't matter, you can write it like this if you want to, it won't be rendered in the final document:

<b>	 Some  Text			Some Text	   Some Text</b>

It will be rendered like this:

 Some Text Some Text Some Text

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So you just go with whatever you find easiest to look at basically.OK thanks Ingolme appreciate it.Edit: <pre> obviously adds the spaces but...<pre>blah blah</pre>and <pre>blahblah</pre>Would be the same right? (Think I'm making this into a bigger issue than it actually is lol)
Yep. You are making this a bigger issue than it is. By default, whitespace is "truncated" (i.e. if you have more than one whitespace character, it will appear as if you've used only one).<pre> is the only element which has different defaults.All of those defaults can be overriden with CSS in a similar fashion to how you could adjust size, color, boldness, position and other thing you'd learn later.The important lesson, which is usually learned later in the game is that you should use HTML elements depending on what they mean in the document, not as to how you want them to appear on screen. If you have a text that was previously formatted (for example, if you're printing the contents of a *.txt file), use <pre>. If you have a paragraph, enclose it in a <p> and a </p> tag. If you have a subheading (i.e. the header that's a subheader of the page's primary header), use <h2>.Later when you learn CSS, you can control all elements' appearance, so stop caring how they appear without it.
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If you've never looked at html or css then focusing on html is the best plan. Compared to other web development languages html is easily the easiest to pick up.You may have read another forum topic where I suggested to the topic author to learn css and html concurrently. That is because they were developing a site that would have used css anyway and they already had some experience with html.Once you feel comfortable with html, feel free to look at css. A forewarning: although css and html are used together, the coding for each is very different.

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Hmm... If different browsers have different ways of interpreting the code, do you have code it individually for each browser?There seems to be a small element of chaos in what is standard, or am I misunderstanding?
You can write code based on what is the current standard, but you're right; different browsers may interpret the same code differently, although this is more of an issue with older browsers (?) these days.You seem to be picking things up smoothly, good job :) btw awesome username :)
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Thanks aquatsr, can't beat a good toasted cheese sandwich. :)So I should just go with the modern standard for things and forget about the old.Another question, as I haven't asks one for minutes now, what's the difference between using non-breaking space   or and just using <br>? Same aren't they, except <br> is infinitely easier to remember and type?

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A Non-breaking space is just a character that will prevent text from wrapping when inside a container smaller than the length of the text.<br> will make a new line.

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<br> technically adds the \A control character before it :)About the compatibility thing, you should code for a modern standards-compliant browser such as FF, OP or SF (but not IE!), then fiddle around until it works in the others.By the way, its a good idea to have a look at what CSS does even if you are planning to understand HTML first, as CSS is now used for presentation, while HTML is only used for structure. HTML presentation elements and attributes such as <font> and align are not used anymore.

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A Non-breaking space is just a character that will prevent text from wrapping when inside a container smaller than the length of the text.<br> will make a new line.
OK I think I get it. Sometimes on websites I see text flying out the side of a box, so nbsp is to stop that happening?I'm only halfway through the basic html tutorial so far so I'm assuming for now later tutorials will go into detail of how to use it.
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<br> technically adds the \A control character before it :)About the compatibility thing, you should code for a modern standards-compliant browser such as FF, OP or SF (but not IE!), then fiddle around until it works in the others.
Yeah the tutorial seems to mention IE a lot, I didn't think anyone even uses it any more, it's a virus magnet.
By the way, its a good idea to have a look at what CSS does even if you are planning to understand HTML first, as CSS is now used for presentation, while HTML is only used for structure. HTML presentation elements and attributes such as <font> and align are not used anymore.
OK I'll take a look, I have no idea what CSS is/does, hadn't even heard of it until I started the html tutorial. (or indeed the difference between html and xhtml)Edit: Slightly off topic for a second, if I update from ff2 to ff3 will all my bookmarks/tags etc. be transferred to the new version?
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Edit: Slightly off topic for a second, if I update from ff2 to ff3 will all my bookmarks/tags etc. be transferred to the new version?
When you launch it, you'll be asked if you want your stuff to be transfered...
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OK. Just for kicks, I'll offer a small illustration of what CSS can add to HTML. Just copy and paste it into a fresh document. Keep in mind that CSS can add a LOT MORE than what I'm showing you.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"   "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"><html>    <head>        <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">        <style type="text/css">            body {                background-color: #ddffdd;                margin: 0;                        }            p {                color: #ff0000;                background-color: #ffffff;                font-family: Verdana, san-serif;            }            #myDiv {                margin: 0 auto;                width: 10em;                border: solid 1px #000000;                background-color: #5555ff;            }        </style>    </head>    <body>        <p>This is a pretty ugly color scheme, and you'd never really squinch your text over to the side like this, but at least you can see what's going on</p>        <div id="myDiv">            <p>TEST DIV</p>        </div>    </body></html>

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When you launch it, you'll be asked if you want your stuff to be transfered...
All good, thanks man. Been messing about with PicLens for the last half hour.
Also, should you want to make your pages interactive, learn PHP and MySQL or JavaScript.
Yeah someone told me I'd need PHP at least. I'm just plowing through html at the moment.
OK. Just for kicks, I'll offer a small illustration of what CSS can add to HTML. Just copy and paste it into a fresh document. Keep in mind that CSS can add a LOT MORE than what I'm showing you.
You'll have to help me out a bit. I'm using notepad to view on ff, but your code doesn't seem to work in that way... in fact, you guys all using notepad? I get the sense I'm going quite... lowtech, on this.
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For your little tidbit on what we use, most tend to hand code in Notepad so that it is standard compliment. Most WYSIWYG editors like to place non standard code in your document. I like to use Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition to hand code because you can see the code in color to identify tags, attributes and plain text. HTML-Kit is a good tool too. :)

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You'll have to help me out a bit. I'm using notepad to view on ff, but your code doesn't seem to work in that way... in fact, you guys all using notepad? I get the sense I'm going quite... lowtech, on this.
http://w3schools.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=760Is a list of common HTML editors.Personally, I use HTML-Kit and the new Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express. Both are excellent.But, until you start learning CSS or whatever else you have in mind, I'd recommend you stick with Notepad(or Notepad++) and learn HTML that way. The others will just complicate the learning process because you'll have to learn the interface for whatever program you choose... I'd say Notepad is pretty simple compared to HTML-Kit or MS VWD Express.Good luck in learning. It is a much bigger beast to tame now than when I first started. Not sure if that makes it harder or easier because of so many options, but either way, best of luck.To wrap it up my suggestions: Use notepad until you start learning more than 1 language. Then choose any freebie(or paid) you want from there.
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While messing around with target attributes I couldn't help but notice it didn't make any difference what I put in the value part. Initially I put target="blank" instead of target="_blank" and it seemed to still work fine, so I thought I'd test it out and tried target="speedboat" and again it made no difference. Also it only opens a new tab in the browser, what about if I want it to open in a separate window? Or am I getting ahead of myself.Edit: And should I not bother spending too much time on moving framesets? I can't remember ever going to a website where they were used and assume there's a reason for that.

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I'm not 100% sure, and there's a big chance I might be wrong, but _blank opens the link in a new window/tab (IT USES BROWSER'S DEFAULT), and a wrong value (like speedboat) uses browser's default.For separate window, there have to be Pop-Ups.

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