Miscellanea

Sections by page titles:

Comments
Document types
Meta Elements
Email & Forms
Stylesheets

1: Comments

To add comments to your markup, enclose the remark in comment delimiters:

That's LessThanExclamationPointHyphenHyphen followed by your comment, and ended with HyphenHyphenGreaterThan.

Comment delimiters can also be used to hide markup from the processing of the browser; anything that is enclosed within the comment will not be processed, and so will be hidden from the viewer:

Partial markup can violate the balancing of the elements' start and end tags, and can cause strange results. With commented-out end tags, elements could end up trying to contain other elements that you don't mean them to contain.

Comments
Document types
Meta Elements
Email & Forms
Stylesheets

2: Document types

HTML 4.01 Transitional

The documents in this site use the Transitional doctype.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

HTML 4.0 Frameset

This doctype is for the containing Frameset document only, not for its frame element documents.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Frameset//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/frameset.dtd">

HTML 4.01 Strict

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

XHTML 1.0 Transitional

<!doctype html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Comments
Document types
Meta Elements
Email & Forms
Stylesheets

3: Meta Elements

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

<html lang="en">

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

<meta name="description" content="A small site devoted to intensely ARP HTML. Presentationalists beware!">

<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, Meta, Web, Language, Charset, Description, Keywords, Refresh, ARP"> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="40; url=http://www.site.dom.invalid/page.html">

<title>A Page that Refreshes</title>

</head>

<body>

<p>Finally some Content, even though it will be whisked away by the meta Refresh element in 40 seconds.</p>

<p>A Web page should contain the words that the meta tags reference; otherwise, the meta tags are lying about the contents. So, this web page uses HTML to give descriptions of a few meta tags: charset; keywords; and refresh, and to show the language attribute for the <html> element. ARP authors as well as loosey-goosey tag soupers need to give honest descriptions of their pages.</p>

</body>

</html>

Comments
Document types
Meta Elements
Email & Forms
Stylesheets

4: Email & Forms

Email Link

Email to: a href="mailto:someone@some.dom.invalid"

Forms

Forms must interact with a server-side script. This form is disabled in two ways: it is posted to an invalid URL, and its Submit button is deactivated. This is so I don't get floods of emails from casual viewers :-P

A Form

The Submit button has been made into a Reset button so this form won't go anywhere.

Comments
Document types
Meta Elements
Email & Forms
Stylesheets

5: Stylesheets

Surprised? Stylesheets are not HTML. They are a presentational supplement to the structural markup of HTML.

If markup is the bones of a document, giving it structure and integrity, then the content is the musculature that fills it out and gives it life. If this, then stylesheets are the clothing that goes over it all.

Stylesheets dress a document beyond the few presentational elements and attributes and values that are available in HTML 4.01 Transitional, and beyond the even fewer of those that are available in HTML 4.01 Strict, or the XHTMLs.

It is vital that the markup that uses stylesheets be correctly written: nesting (first in, last out); closing of all possible content elements (start & end tags); appropriate use of block level elements to contain inline elements; semantic use of elements as much as possible. Unless the markup is accurate, strange things can happen: fonts may get bigger with each successive paragraph; bits may land on other bits; things may disappear; and more.

For more on this, see these links:

Cascading Style Sheets, level 1

Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2

CSS Pointers Group

CSS Quick Tutorial

Dave Raggett's Introduction to CSS

Stylesheets will affect only those browsers that use them. Otherwise, a document will take the attribute values in your markup.

A page demonstrating image scaling using the CSS unit, Em as the basis for the image sizing relative to text.