** 1 page regular HTML tutorial / 659 words **

HTML coding

Neil Jones-Rodway introduces a few more of those HTML tricks...

Over the past few issues this tutorial has covered some of the key ideas and features of HTML. The HTML language contains many, many more features, but this issue we'll look at the last few things that could be considered "essential".

Lists

** NESTED.GIF here **

HTML lets you have two kinds of lists: ordered and unordered. Ordered lists (<OL>...</OL>) are numbered sequentially and unordered lists (<UL>...</UL>) are "bulleted" (a bullet is the large dot denoting each item). In both cases, each list item is marked with a <LI> tag, as follows:

Ingredients for an Omlette:
<UL>
<LI> 2 eggs
<LI> Salt and pepper
<LI> A pinch of mixed herbs
<LI> Margarine for frying
<LI> A filling of some kind
</UL>

List tags can also have attributes:

The <OL...> tag can have a START=... attribute, which lets you start numbering from any number instead of the normal 1, and a TYPE=... attribute to set the style of the numbering. This type can be either a "1", an "A" or "a", or an "I" or "i", for "1, 2, 3..." numbering, "A, B, C..." or "a, b, c..." lettering, and "I, II, III..." or "i, ii, iii..." numerating respectively.

The <UL...> tag can also have a TYPE=... attribute, in this case either CIRCLE, DISC or SQUARE to select the bullet type.

Lists can also be nested which is especially useful for ordered lists as it allows you to number chapters and sections automatically. Although typically list items only consist of a few words there's no limit - a paragraph or two could be inserted. An HTML document is included on the Reader disk which displays each different list format.

Link tricks

HTML links can do a lot more than link to other HTML pages, you can also link to:
** BL **
* HREF="mailto:someone@somewhere.net" enables the reader to send an email to "someone@somewhere.net".
* HREF="news:comp.sys.atari.st" connects the reader to the specified newsgroup.
* HREF="ftp://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/atari/" connects the user to the atari directory of the "ftp.uni-kl.de" FTP site.
** BL end **

Currently CAB can handle email links internally and passes everything else to dedicated News or FTP clients.

Accents

Getting international characters to appear correctly isn't as easy as you'd think. The problem stems from the fact that the ASCII standard only defined the first 128 out of the 256 possible characters, the second half of the character set (which includes all the accented characters) is unfortunately platform dependent. As HTML is designed to work across different platforms, this had to be resolved.

The solution was straightforward and quite neat. All of the accented characters, and most of the commonly used symbols, are given a name, and these names are used to tell the browser exactly which character to display. The names are bound in a &...; to mark them as these escaped characters. An a umlaut (ä) is written as &auml; a capital A umlaut (Ä) as &Auml; and so on. A full list along with a SYMBOLS.HTM document is included on the Reader disk. As you may have guessed you can't use plain &'s in your text (or <'s and >'s either) so these have also been assigned escaped characters &amp;, &lt; and &gt; respectively.

** SYMBOLS.GIF **
** On Reader disk logo here **
** Caption **
Here's some of the more common escaped characters you may want to use. Accents are only shown for a but can be used on any vowel
** end **

We have now covered all the basics needed to put together a respectable HTLM document. There are still plenty of HTML features we haven't covered but you should be able to pick up the finer points by dissecting other people's HTML files.

Next issue, in the final instalment of this tutorial, we'll construct a set of pages from the ground up, and find practical uses for functions covered since #AC3 - so get some practice in.