This page is intended to hold a series of reports on technical investigations I have made into areas which may be of interest to others. I'm not approaching these from a purist or expert angle, but from a "what useful information can a beginner learn" aspect. I'll include links to resources that I find on the way, as well as experience gained from attempting to do stuff myself.
Contents
HTML
Cascading Style Sheets
Embedded Fonts
Dynamic HTML
CGI
Scalable Vector Graphics
Fonts
Most of us know HTML, so I'm not going to go into a long explanation, just point out some useful links and give some advice from what I've learned.
When we're creating tables and inserting invisible gifs of various sizes just so we can get a decent presentation of our pages, something must be wrong. Cascading Style Sheets are supposed to solve all this. They are dead easy to use and produce good results, but there are a few things to be aware of.
You can specify in your style sheet, or directly in HTML what fonts you want your page to be displayed in. However, if your PC, or browser, doesn't have that font installed, the users miss out on your choice of presentation. Netscape have got together with Bitstream to provide a solution to this, which they've called TrueDoc fonts.
What is dynamic HTML? Is it of any use to you? Will it reduce your readership to those using one particular version of one browser? Find out.
CGI has been around for a while, but it's worth a look to see what it's capable of. It's the simplest way to provide generated content on your web page. Find out more.
Scalable Vector Graphics have been used in many design packages and drawing tools and are better than bitmaps for file size, manipulation and printing in a lot of cases. This page looks at how they are being implemented on the web.
I've been looking at fonts for the last few weeks, trying to figure out the difference between Postscript and True Type, and how to convert from one file format to another.
Hopefully, the following subjects will be covered here in the future:
Author: David Meiklejohn
Web Page: here
Last Updated: 24/02/2000
Review Date: 01/10/2000