web authoring links
accessibility issues
- W3C - the World Wide Web Consortium
- The people who set the standards for HTML, CSS etc.
- W3C web content accessibility guidelines
- Guidelines for creating accessible website. Not very readable, but includes useful checklists.
- The W3C HTML validator
- Checks to see if your page meets the standards for HTML, and tells you what needs changing to fix it.
- The W3C CSS validator
- Checks to see if your page meets the standards for CSS, and tells you what needs changing to fix it.
design issues
- www.useit.com
- Jakob Nielsen's site, which covers web design from a usability perspective. A wide range of material, very readable and may well change your idea of what constitutes good web design forever.
- Philip and Alex's guide to web publishing
- Philip Greenspun's book about publishing database-backed web sites. Includes some pertinent thoughts about site design, usability etc, too. Highly readable and the man knows his onions, though I don't agree with his low opinion of the W3C and HTML's development.
- Viewable with any browser campaign
- Incorporates useful information on designing sites for accessibility and interoperability.
reference guides
- Index Dot HTML
- Reference to HTML tags and attributes, also includes Index Dot CSS, which does the same for Cascading Style Sheets.
- W3C HTML specification
- The definitive statement on what you should and shouldn't be using in your markup, though it's not particularly readable.
useful software
editors and authoring utilities
Please note: producing good web pages is not expensive. There is some great software available for little or no cost, and that means you can also avoid horrid "advertising-supported" spyware packages. Who wants a load of advertising polluting their screens, coupled with nasty little tracking programs on their computers, invading your privacy and potentially revealing your personal information to all and sundry? See the Gibson Research web site's OptOut pages for more on spyware, and Lavasoft's Ad-Aware pages for spyware removal software.
Everything listed here is free, apart from DBtoWEB, which costs all of £10 sterling (so it's hardly going to break the bank).
- Arachnophilia
- Free XHTML editor, used for some time for authoring this site (though much of the original content was first authored using Everest on an Atari ST, and some pages have been through the Frontpage Express mangle before fixing). Still used for some jobs, though I'm using Amaya as my main editor now. Arachnophilia used to be a Windows-only program, but the author has now ported it to Java so it's cross-platform.
- Amaya
- Free, mostly-WYSIWYG, XHTML editor/browser for Windows/Linux/Unix/MacOS-X from the W3C, open source in case anyone else wants to use it on other platforms, writes good HTML to latest standards (though it has its quirks and tends to crash occasionally, but with good recovery features so you rarely lose work). Takes a little getting used to if you are used to pure Windows software, though in my opinion worth the effort.
- HTMLGen
- Free software for generating web pages from databases (eg Access) - used for generating the Atari y2k page on this site - unfortunately its output needs fixing with HTML-Tidy and/or Amaya as it can insert odd invisible characters in the pages it creates which need removing for successful validation.
- DBtoWEB
- Shareware software which does similar things to HTMLGen, but is more flexible and it doesn't output rogue characters - worth the £10! We use it at work to produce a subject gateway from an Access database and it seems very reliable. We've been using it for years, generating approximately 400 pages each week: it's very stable and does what it says it does - and it was essential when we started using it, as using a live database-backed site wasn't an option at the time.
- HTML-Tidy
- Free software from the W3C which takes a page and fixes the HTML up, mending broken markup and converting the page to XHTML 1.0 if required.
browsers
Alternative (to Internet Explorer) browsers which handle web standards better, and some specialised browsers.
Mozilla/Gecko browsers
- Mozilla Application Suite
- Also known as Sea Monkey. Full-blown suite including browser, email client, IRC client, HTML editor. Available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and multiple varieties of *nix. Slowly being superseded by the collection of separate Mozilla programs which has Firefox as teh browser and Thunderbird as email client.
- Firefox
- Latest Mozilla product: the Application Suite is being deconstructed, separating the browser and other components, which are all being streamlined. Firefox is the best choice IMHO, if you have anything other than a very old/low specification computer. Available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and multiple varieties of *nix. Debian (and some derivative distros, eg Knoppix) has its own variant called Ice Weasel, because the Debian maintainers don't like the licensing terms for the Firefox artwork. Ice Weasel is essentially Firefox with different icons etc.
- K-meleon
- Cut-down browser for Windows based on the Gecko rendering engine, but with a native Windows interface. Ideal for older/low spec PCs, but as it lags behind Mozilla and Firefox, I'd go for Firefox if you can.
- Camino
- Gecko-based browser for MacOS - similar idea to K-meleon, a Gecko browser with a native interface.
- Galeon
- The same sort of idea as K-meleon and Camino, but for the Gnome desktop on Linux.
Commercial browsers
- Opera
- An excellent commercial browser, now free (the free version used to be adware, but now they've dropped the ads and the paid-for version). Lots of handy features, and available for multiple platforms, including Windows, MacOS, Linux, games consoles like the Nintendo Wii and Symbian smartphones.
Other standards-based browsers
- Konqueror
- A standards-based browser for the KDE desktop on Linux.
- Safari
- Apple's own browser for MacOS, based on the Konqueror rendering engine.