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No, you got it dead on. What do you mean, it bloats HTML? What does that mean?
 
Neil, simple HTML can be quite easy to pick up. Use a good site such as HTML Goodies which should get you on the road to creating a simple page.

One note about pictures, the link to you logo was a bitmap (.bmp) file. Bitmap files are much larger so it takes longer to download, thats also why you couldn't post it to the forum as the file was too large. For the web, pictures should be saved as Jpegs (.jpg) or GIFs (.gif) these have much smaller file sizes so load quicker.

A few weeks ago I set up my page to display some of my rocketry photos. It's very much work in progress but what you see at the moment (11th Dec) didnt take *too* long create out of simple HTML.
 
when you learn to code in HTML you can make your pages very 'clean' and fast loading. Some of Microsoft's programs, FrontPage and Publisher included, often add lots and lots of 'extra'code'. It's kind of a CYA situation (not talking glue here) so rather than take a chance on some browser not being able to read a web page generated by Publisher, Microsft just adds tons of formatting code to make sure it will open. The more code, the slower your pages will load.

The main thing you need to do first is understand HTML.

Lots and lots of good resources listed in this thread. My personal preference (and this is where I learned HTML early on) is https://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/

look on the right side of the page for the How-to Library. They have great primers and tutorials. Using their tutorials create a couple HTML documents using Windows Notepad.

If you open a PUblisher web page in Internet Explorer and then click on the View menu and then click on Source and you will see what the HTML code from Publisher looks like. Its ugly.

After you undertand HTML better you will better be able to see the "bloat" as I call it.

Good web programmers try to keep their HTML code minimal and clean as possible to acheive their desired results.
 
Neil,

First (for the most part) keep ALL images on your web site as either JPG or GIF. JPG for photographs and GIF for black and white or simple color graphics (like something from PAINT)

For example, that logo you pointed to is a BMP file and takes up 607KB of space (the limit for attaching files here on TRF is 100KB). NO ONE would ever go to your site again if the logo was 607KB as it would take forever to open the page (specially for dialup users)

I converted your logo to GIF format and it only takes up 9KB of space (about 1.5% of the original) - attached.

Another word to the wise, when puting documents on your site, you'd be best if you could convert them to PDF format instead of uploading word docs and the like.

hope this helps!
jim
 
My HTML coding weapon of choice is the Allaire suite of programs [HomeSite, Cold Fusion, et al]. It lets you write the code, and it will close tags for you if you're really lazy...but at least you get to write your own code with no bloat.

One of my first jobs as a web developer was to clean up FrontPage generated code because this company wanted to put everything on compact disk for a business app they were developing [granted, everything would have fit on the 650M disk anyway, but file copying time would have been lengthy]. I took 4M+ web and crunched it down to just less than 1M.

Just like building a rocket, when you build a webpage, keep it simple, even when you're trying to be complex. My tendency would be to warn against cutting and pasting someone else's source code without knowing what it means simply if its doing something you don't want it to do, you're not going to know how to fix it.

One piece of advice I got early on in my web coding "career" was to remember the newspaper publishing principle of what appears "above the fold". In web terms, this is what first appears on a user's browser window before they even scroll down. You don't want to put any hyperlinks above the fold on your front page because if a user clicks on a link before reading the whole front page, they will have gone past a bunch of other stuff without ever having seen it.

As for graphics, jflis is absolutely correct; you don't want to put inline some image that's going to take more than about 5 seconds to load [on a 28.8K modem line, that would be anything bigger than ~145K]. In fact, your whole page shouldn't take more than 15-20 seconds to load. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator is what many professional web graphics people use to optimize graphics.

As for PDFs, Word has a feature that let's you save *.docs in PDF format, right?
 
Did you do something to the smoke, jim? It looks like you put in a different kind of grey or something. Was that intentional? Looks kinda cool....
 
Another good website to look at, Neil, is this one which demonstrates the code. Just do a view source to see how it all works.
 
Wow...very good site - bookmarked it! Thanks gothique!

Neil, I barely have any experience in HTML, but I taught myself the HTML from the bottom up. My site I recommend that you use Geocities or similar free hosting site so that you can play around with the HTML and know what you are doing before you start up your site. HTML is not hard to write once you know what you are doing. BTW, my site is very simple. Take a look at it's source code and see try to understand it, it's EASY - make yourself a very basic site like mine to start off. Also, check out HTML Goodies. This site was invaluable as I taught myself.

That's my advice! Have fun!

Jason
 
Originally posted by Neil
Did you do something to the smoke, jim? It looks like you put in a different kind of grey or something. Was that intentional? Looks kinda cool....

Nope, just did a quick and dirty conversion to GIF. I didn't even optimize it, just a quick save-as...

Just wanted to show you how *small* (byte-wise) you can make images for web applications.

jim
 
Originally posted by gothique_97


As for PDFs, Word has a feature that let's you save *.docs in PDF format, right?

Only if you have the writer installed (ADOBE is recommended, but costly...) PDF is proprietory to ADOBE and microsoft has no license to use it so it doesn't come bundled with WORD or any other microsoft app. It *does* however come bundled with CORELdraw and many other tools.

I beleive that it also comes bundled with Compaq and HP desktops

jim
 
It's pretty much pointless learning actual HTML code these days, a site that I look after looks just fine made with a "What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get" (WYSIWYG) editor - Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. Get it and be happy with your newfound elite web skills :D .
Just check out the New Zealand Experimental site, I made the basis for this site in about 3 or so days, and i'm only 15... and that just shows that anyone can use it ! :)
 
Mattex - I have to respectfully disagree with your statement that
"It's pretty much pointless learning actual HTML code these days"

HTML is still the 'essence' of web coding. While it may not be 'necessary' to learn HTML it is certainly worthwhile if you want to understand and have full control over what you are doing. Even the high end WYSIWYG web design software packages need thier HTML cleaned up once in awhile.

HTML is by far the easiest programming language to learn so why not just make the effort to understand it and you'll have much more freedom and a better sense of accomplishment.

just my 2 cents.
 
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