Page for information about making WWW pages

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Foreword on web publishing

The World Wide Web is a multimedia hypertext information retrieval system that sits on top of Internet.

Publishing on the Web is very different from older methods of publication. A Web publication is inherently a general, device-independent and program-independent document with structural markup. The presentation of a document may vary greatly to allow viewing the same document on a wide variety of devices, ranging from small mobile phone screen to full-size movie screens.

The HTML language was designed to promote worldwide distribution of documents in a device-independent form. HTML file consists of content and it's structure all stored in one file in a standardized form. HTML is far from being perfect for the purpose, but it has served well and is suitable for a wide range of documents. It is easy to learn and easy to use. Practically any computer literate people can put the documents onto the Web in a few hours, after an initial education of a day or two. One reason for putting up this web page is to provide people a place to find the information on web publishing from one place and learn the most necessary skills in few days.

Some people (mostrly from traditional publishing industries) think that Web authors should decide the physical appearance of documents like font, color, layout, and other presentation features. For such reasons HTML is implemented usually with nonstandard extensions (some of them though later standardized) to control the dicument features like colors, fonts and font sizes. This kind of way of making web pages breaks the whole basic idea that HTML should be viewable with practically any kind of device. Many advertised "HTML programing skills" are quite much bluff and breaking the whole idea of HTML. Journalists may say that presentation issues cannot be distinguished from structure and content, so presentation must be designed for each concrete publication and issue separately.

Layout will not lose its importance but it will take more and more place on users' systems and the users have their own preferences on layout and style (colors and margins and fonts and so on). In such case layout by the author or by the publishing side will not get through as wanted and an attempt to enforce it might fail miserably. When the presentation fails, the document will look like a mess and the user will therefore discard it.

If exact presentation always in the same look and layout is essential to the document, it is usually be better to publish such documents but by using other methods than HTML (for example Adpbe Acrobat PDF format is very suitable format for publishing such documents on the web).

Linking turns texts to hypertext, and hypertextuality is among the key factors that make the World-Wide Web a web of interconnected things. Using links on your Web pages, you can conveniently let your readers find background information, technical details, definitions of terms, etc., on your pages or somewhere else. A link is a just a pointer or reference, it does not do anything by itself. A URL is rather like a telephone number or a street address which just tells how to reach a document on the web. The general rule proposed for linking is that one may freely set up non-framed HREF links to the web sites of others, is a rather reassuring rule since it happens to comport well with common practice and with common sense.

Webmaster should be prepared for the possibility that members of the public may set up bookmarks to subpages, and that other HTML authors may set up links to subpages. Since this sort of bookmarking and linking can and will happen, the webmaster should be courteous to those visitors and HTML authors. The webmaster, upon moving a page, should have the courtesy to supply a "forwarding" page that lets the visitor know the new page URL.

It is very good idea to have linked on the pages recognized as links so that users have no difficulty in noticing which word is a link. It belongs to the very basic skills needed in Web browsing to be able to recognize a link as displayed on one's browser and to follow a link. Any attemt to hide the link or change the apprearance what tha user had used to see on their browser will usually lead to more harms to usability than good to the presentation. When you do not show clear what is link and what is not, the browsing becomes guesswork, trial and error.

Speed and usablity are also necessary factors to consider. Most of the web is is too slow nowadays. The slow operation comes from the available bandwidth to access the site, amount of data to be transferred and how the material is put to the pages. The bandwidth available is controlled by the network connection your web server has to Internet and the speed of the connection your client has and the load of the core network in between. This speed hard to control by the web master in any other way than selecting good connection from a good networking company or using a good web hotel service. Amount of transferred data and how it is presented can be controlled by proper web design. You can reduce the amount of transferred data by making good HTML code (some HTML tools produce few times bigger HTML files than what is needed to present the document), slecting right file formats and conversion parameters for pictures and other documents and avoiding using unnecessary large pictures. Sometimes the loading speed seen by user is also affected by the web browser rending speed and way they do it (for example some versions of Netscape draw tables only when it has get all it's cells completely which sometimes can take lots of time). With good network connection, powerful enough web server and good web design the web page accesses can be made quick to operate.

When making a new large web site it is a good idea to design the site structure well so that you don't have to redesign it many time over and over. Usually this means designing the menus and directory structures for the whole site. Whjen you get this ready don't hurry in putting it online.Publishing just a site skeleton with menus and subpages without real content in the end just frustrates the users who come by to your site. It is better to first make a small working site with little material and then enhance it later than publishing a large page structure without any content. It is better to promise what is coming later on the main oage or subpage than making links to pages which just say "under construction" or "coming soon" or "page not found". Users of the site just get frustrated because you seemed to promise than your site has some interresting material by putting the link visible, but failed to keepp that promise. Users of the web pages are dissappointed when they encounter many this kind of thing on your page and go to some other site and propably never come back. The fact of the life is that that most of the things promised to "come soon" usually don't come anytime soon on-line if ever come on-line. A web site with lots of pages with just "coming soon" in them is just makes many dissapointed users who don't come back to your site later to check out of your promises of new material is true or not (because on most those promises are not kept).

Here are some general rules on web publishing:

Web site performance review checklist:

General information

Web protocol information

Universal Resource Identifier (URI) information

HTML details

XML

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML. An XML page looks something like an HTML page, but there the similarity ends. XML uses HTML-style tags not just to format documents, but also to identify the kinds of information used in documents, so that information can be reformatted for use in other documents and can also be used for information processing. To put that another way, you can use XML to represent data portably. XML is clearly the way of the future as it establishes a common base from which content can be expanded into other formats.

XSL is a technology related to XML. XSL provides a mechanism for formatting and transforming XML, either at the browser or on the server.

Character sets

Character set problems related to Finland

Web design

HTML checkers and validators

Forms

Frames

Frames allow you to divide the page into several rectangular areas and to display a separate document in each rectangle. Each of those rectangles is called a "frame". Frames are very popular because they are one of the few ways to keep part of the page stationary while other parts change. Frames are also one of the most controversial uses of HTML, because of the way the frames concept was designed, and because many web framed web sites are poorly implemented.

Normal frames are used to divide the entire browser window (or a frame) to subwindows. Inline frames appear inside the presentation of a document and allow embedding relatively small documents onto pages.

Fonts in WWW pages

Web programming and scripting

Several technologies are used to create customized Web pages, including the Perl language, Microsoft's Active Server Pages, the PHP hypertext preprocessor, Java, JavaScript and other methods. Nowadays customizd web pages can be created in the web server or on the fly on the client side. There are many different scripting technologies for this kind of and they are each suitable for different applications.

Style sheets

Graphics in WWW

Making multimedia web pages

Legal things to consider

Web page usability issues

Useful tools

Web server programs

Web browsers

Web caching information

A Web cache sits between Web servers (or origin servers) and a client and watches requests for HTML pages, images and files come by, saving a copy for itself. Then, if there is another request for the same object, it will use the copy that it has, instead of asking the origin server for it again. This is used to reduce latency and to reduce traffic.

Security issues

Web page announcing and searching

HTTP protocol information

HTTP has been in use by the World Wide Web since 1990 and its use has increased steadily over the years, mainly because it has proven useful as a generic middleware protocol.

Web publishing magazines

Free web hosting

The following web sites provide free web hosting services. Usually the free web hosting services will add advertisements to the pages in them. For more details check what those service providers have to offer.

Non-conventional ways to access web

Tools for webmasters and web publishers

Web statistics

Other related links

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