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CMS, computers, HTML-XML-CSS, eLearning, open sources

Google Hacks

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one hundred industrial-strength tips and tools

This has got nothing to do with hacking in the normal sense. It’s a book about improving your Web search skills using the world’s best search engine. Google is the ultimate research tool – a formidable search engine that now indexes more than eight billion web pages, in more than 30 languages, conducting more than 150 million searches a day. The more you know about Google, the better you are at pulling data off the Web. This book is a collection of real-world, tested solutions to practical problems. It offers a variety of interesting ways to mine the information at Google, and helps you have fun while doing it.

Google HacksTara Calishan shows you how to make the most of Google’s basic services; how to access image collections and newsgroups; looking for phone numbers and news stories; multi-language searches; and maximising the rankings of your own web pages. Google is not case sensitive; there’s a limit of ten words; you can’t use the asterisk for wildcards on letters, but you can use it for complete words.

There’s advice on how to improve your search results using slang terms. You can search by page title, URL, link, filetype, date, language, and even pages which are stored in cache. Even more miraculously, you can enter details of a page at Google and have them translated into any number of foreign languages.

Google also now includes its own special services – images, news, groups, and catalogues. Just type one of these words instead of www in the address.

The second part of the book offers a detailed technical account of how to merge Google into your own site. This will appeal to programmers. Once you’ve got this set up you can then indulge a whole variety of customisations, games, personalised searches, and even pranks.

I found all the scripting quite a struggle, but then suddenly the last part of the book is a wonderfully clear and persuasive section about raising the rankings of your own pages. How to choose meta tag terms; where to position your best material; and if you want to get really complicated, how the page rank algorithm works.

There is then a really good checklist of advice about making your site more efficient by simplifying and shrinking pages. For any serious web masters, the book is worth it for this part alone.

All these advanced search strategies make this an invaluable resource for librarians, information engineers, and any serious researchers. No wonder the first printing sold out immediately.

The new third edition has been completely reorganized and offers many new searches, along with coverage of Gmail, Google Desktop, Google Site Search, and tips on using Google AdWords.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Tara Calishan and Rael Dornfest, Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools, 3rd edn, Sebastopol CA: O’Reilly, 2003, pp.576, ISBN 0596527063

Guide to XML for Web Designers

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full explanation of XML coding and web design

XML is a set of codes which allow you, the user, to define the structure of your documents. These might be any tags – from <title> to <footnote>, from <quotation> to <caption>. People familiar with HTML will feel on home ground here. These tags mean that data can be displayed in whatever way you choose. For instance, once they have been tagged, a collection of books could be displayed in order of author, title, or publication date – with only one command – say, a click on a tab or a menu item.

Guide to XMLHowever, before you get too excited, XML has nothing to do with the manner in which the information is displayed on screen. For that, you need to add cascading style sheets. As Teresa Martin points out:

Insert some XML tags into your page and… they’ll just sit there. But, combined with style data, scripting data … you can create some powerful ways to present information

So – XML doesn’t make actions happen: it is used to define and describe a document. She provides quite a lot on the history of these standards – why and how they came into being, and who brought them about. There’s even a chapter on how the W3C deals with submissions and makes decisions about standards. This delays the hands-on instruction if read in page order, but I felt glad for the background.

In fact, en passant, there is a lot of interesting information on how and why XML has grown out of SGML, plus information on the Document Type Definition (DTD) and the Document Object Model (DOM). All this will be of interest to those people who want to know the difference between SGML, HTML, XML, and CSS, as well as those with a curiosity about information design and architecture. She also points to some of the latest developments which will be available soon – XPointer and XLink, which will allow a menu of potential destinations when you click on a hyperlink.

When the XML instructions eventually arrive, they are relatively simple and very similar to HTML. The one difference is that all tags have to be opened and closed without exception. She describes document structure, elements, and format via metaphors – which will be laboured for the technically-minded but reassuring for those like me who want their hands held as we walk into this complex world.

She includes the sensible suggestion that writing the document and adding the tags are kept as two separate processes. Trying to do both at the same time can easily result in a longer writing process, or missing some tags.

XML will be of most interest to people who are working with complex documents such as catalogues and instruction manuals which need to be consistent, or very big single documents such as reference manuals and dictionaries. It’s for creating the possibility of displaying the data in a number of different forms – alphabetically, by subject, author surname, date of publication, or even selected topic.

And if you feel you are going dizzy with all the acronyms and markup language, Teresa Martin has a valuable piece of advice. She suggests that you repeat as a mantra – ‘I can’t do it all’.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Teresa A. Martin, Project Cool Guide to XML for Web Designers, London-New York: John Wiley, 2006, pp.298, ISBN 047134401X

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Hackers and Painters

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software design, open sources, and eCommerce

Paul Graham co-wrote the software for Viaweb, which was bought out by Yahoo for their successful build-it-yourself online stores kit. Hackers and Painters is his reflections on software design, eBusiness, open software, and capitalism today. You might be surprised by the resulting mix. It’s written in an engaging, grab-you-by-the-lapels style, and because he’s studied it, a lot of the argument is conducted via the metaphor of painting. Overall this works, because he is putting the case for craftsmanship, discipline, and originality. He makes an interesting defence of a hacker’s right to disregard copyright – on the grounds that we need to keep their anti-authoritarian attitudes alive to preserve civil liberties, defending a free, strong society.

Hackers and PaintersHis next subject is Web-based software. This is where you don’t buy and install software on your own computer. Instead, it sits on a central server, and you interact with it via a web browser – which might be a mobile phone, a PDA, or a telephone. If necessary of course, you could also use a computer. The central item in what’s billed as ‘Big ideas from the computer age’ is upbeat and inspiring advice for would-be start-ups:

There are only two things you need to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend. If you get these two right, you’ll be ahead of most startups. You can figure out the rest as you go.

It’s a combination of technological theory, eBusiness strategy, and tips for would-be software developers. But because he’s anti-authoritarian, a supporter of open source software, and all in favour of free enterprise, don’t imagine he’s a traditional radical. One of his essays is an argument in favour not only of individual wealth, but encouraging differences in wealth.

There are two interesting essays on the evolution of programming languages. Non-technical readers don’t need to worry, because they are written in a lively, jargon-free style that’s easy to understand.

Despite my reservations on his economic policies, he shot up in my estimation when he put his cards on the table regarding the academic world:

In any academic field, there are topics that are ok to work on and others that aren’t. Unfortunately the distinction between acceptable and forbidden topics is usually based on how intellectual the work sounds when described in research papers, rather than how important it is for getting good results. The extreme case is probably literature; people studying literature rarely say anything that would be of the slightest use to those producing it.

There is a whole policy review, a major reinvestigation of ‘lit crit’, and a great deal of intellectual soul-searching to be done on the strength of that one observation alone.

At the heart of the book, there’s also an argument in favour of the Lisp programming language. It’s what he used to write his successful venture at Viaweb.

This is a lively and thought-provoking collection of studies which comes from somebody who has both done the programming first hand, and thought a lot about the social consequences of it.

© Roy Johnson 2010

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Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2010, pp.272, ISBN: 1449389554

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Here Comes Everybody

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how change happens when people come together

Clay Shirky’s basic argument in Here Comes Everybody is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people’s ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson’s in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites.

Here Comes EverybodyThe classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of ‘citizen reporters’ grew, the newspapers started their own blogs – written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that’s where they’re at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls ‘vanity publishing’. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader.

A propos ‘professional’ journalists complaining that bloggers are not really ‘citizen journalists’ Shirky makes the perceptive observation that a) none of them claims to be, and b) they are something else that’s new, which the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognised.

There is very little difference between a paid journalist who blogs (such as Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal) and Guido Fawkes (libertarian individual blogger) except that Guido is more likely to take risks in exposing political corruption and scandal fraud, whilst Iain’s column is largely amusing and well-informed comment on the same events after they have been exposed.

The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions (such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century) are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production – but the press made them redundant within fifty years.

The same is happening now. We don’t know clearly yet what form the outcomes of fully developed social media will take, but it’s quite obvious already that they are displacing older media such as fax machines (remember those) printed newspapers, film cameras, and handwritten letters.

Shirky has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. The reason is that it has self-correction built into its system, and it appeals to people’s altruism. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else will correct it – often within a matter of minutes.

There’s more to it than that of course. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems (as in the Long Tail argument) are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one.

The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.

The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new).’What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media.’

Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples – from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations.

He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. For every Linux success story, there are thousands of OSS projects that don’t get off the ground. Commercial software developers can’t afford that degree of failure: they have to choose workable projects in order to pay their own wages.

His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now.

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© Roy Johnson 2010

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp.344, ISBN: 0141030623

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Home and Small Office Networking

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practical guide to building a home network on a budget

Many homes these days have a second or a spare computer; and more people than ever are either working from home or starting their own small businesses. For all of them, setting up a computer network can be the foundation for more efficient working. With links between your equipment, you can keep in touch with people in another room or out on the road. You can share information, keep everything updated from one desk, and share resources. But how would you go about doing it? Well, John Paul Mueller provides the advice and the tools you will need in Home and Small Office Networking his plain-speaking guide to setting up a computer network for small businesses on a budget. His approach is extremely thorough.

Home and Small Office NetworkingHe starts by helping you to define what you might need, how to set up a small office network, and the range of cheap options available. Did you know that it’s even possible to use the electrical wiring in your own home as the basis for the network? There’s plenty here on cabling, connections, and tips on the best equipment to choose. It might be a technically challenging task – but he takes you through step by step, passing on a lot of first-hand experience on the way.

He also spends quite some time on the software you will need for efficient administration of the system, as well as network security and maintenance. But the part which I suspect will appeal most to a lot of get-up-and-go entrepreneurs are the chapters on remote communications and connections via the Internet. These will allow you to share information and keep in touch with both mobile and home workers.

And he doesn’t neglect either the costs or the cost-effectiveness of building such a system. His goal is to help small businesses get the most from networking, and he both looks at the benefits and explains in easy-to-understand language how to design, protect, and maintain your network.

The main point of these books from the very successful Poor Richard series is that they provide the enthusiast, the amateur, and the small business with lots of budget-priced tools for development. They explain what to do in a jargon-free, no-nonsense manner, and they offer lists of free and bargain-level resources. Whether you’re in the next room or on the road, this book tells you how to set up an inexpensive network.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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John Paul Mueller, Poor Richard’s Home and Small Office Networking, Lakewood CO: Top Floor, 2001, pp.357, ISBN 1930082037

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Hot Text: Web Writing That Works

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new writing  techniques for web communication

If you’re thinking of putting some of your writing on line, keep this rule of thumb in mind. Write 50% less than you would in print – otherwise people will not read it. This is one of the hundreds of tips and guidelines packed into Jonathan and Lisa Price’s new book, Hot Text. They start with a chapter of advice on writing for an audience, and getting closer to the reader, then they move on to something I found fascinating – the concept of ‘writing objects’. This is the practice of splitting up documents into small re-useable parts. It’s basically a plea for applying XML principles during the authoring process. This will enable you to produce Web documents which can be used for any number of purposes.

Hot Text: Web Writing That WorksThis is intermediate to advanced level stuff – not for beginners – and you will need to be patient. There’s a lot of important technological data before they get round to any advice on writing skills. But when they do, it comes in bucketloads. Another important point they make is that text has a double function on the web. It conveys content, but it also acts as an aid to navigation, because we do not have the physical aids provided by printed books. For this reason they advise writers to use plenty of typographical guidance.

They also emphasise the need for brevity and chunking. You should use short sentences, short paragraphs, and make the structure of all documents stand clear in a self-explanatory manner.

Once they get under way, every point is illustrated with before and after examples – 200 words of exposition reduced to 50, for instance. They even deal with issues such as reducing punctuation and moving any statistical data into tables or charts.

The centre of the book is packed with good examples of how to produce efficient writing – leading with punch lines; reducing ambiguity; how to write menus; creating the right tone; how to arrange bulleted lists; and where to place links grammatically for best effect.

They use case studies of sites such as AltaVista, Microsoft, and Amazon to discuss the requirements of writing for eCommerce, and they are particularly good at the special requirements of writing Help files and FAQs.

For commercial sites they are relentlessly on the side of the customer – and the suggestions they offer will allow any honest trader to get closer to customers and win their trust. The formula is simple – be honest, put the customer first, and don’t waffle.

They cover a wide range of digital genres – web marketing copy, news releases, email newsletters, webzine articles, personal resumes, Weblogs – and they even provide tips for would-be job seekers.

Ignore the cheesy photos of the authors which punctuate their chapters. This book is packed with good advice on web writing and modern communication skills – and it’s a must-have for any web content developers, documentation authors, online course constructors, and e-Commerce editors.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Jonathan and Lisa Price, Hot Text: Web Writing that Works, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2002, pp.507, ISBN: 0735711518

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How the Web was Born

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Readable technological history of Internet and Web

Robert Cailliau’s name was on the original research proposal for the World Wide Web, along with Tim Berners-Lee. This is his account of the development, written with James Gilles. They start with a quick history of the Internet, focussing on the key feature of packet-switching which made the Web possible. Part two switches to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva. Here the story becomes one of scientists from all over the world who need to share, archive, and retrieve information. CERN had developed its own Intranet, and by the late 1980s had become Europe’s biggest Internet site.

world wide webAs with most accounts of Internet history, you have to keep up with a complex chronology as the separate stories of each technological strand are developed: the TCP/IP protocols; the development of the PC; and the HCI (human computer interface). Fortunately, all technical terms are explained, and the general reader will be grateful for the appendices which include a timeline, a list of key individuals, a bibliography, an explanation of acronyms, and of course an index.

They include character sketches of all the main figures – Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Douglas Engelbert, who first thought of Windows, hypertext, and the mouse respectively.

There’s an interesting chapter on the rapid rise and fall of the UK computer industry which in the early 1980s was producing the world’s highest per-capita ownership of personal computers.

They also include potted histories of hypertext, and the pre-web search software such as Archie, WAIS, and Gopher. People who have used these command-line interfaces are likely to look back and smile fondly.

Finally, after all the preliminaries, everything is set for what was to be the killer application of the Internet – the invention of the World Wide Web.

It’s still amazing to think how recent all this has been – only ten years ago – as this second edition of their book is issued on the Web’s birthday.

If you want a history of the Web which is more general than Tim Berners-Lee’s more personal account in Weaving the Web, this is an excellent alternative.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, How the Web was Born, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p.372, ISBN 0192862073

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HTML and XHTML

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the encyclopaedia of HTML coding – and the latest XHTML

The problem with HTML is that just when you thought you had grasped the basics of web page design, something new emerges. Here comes the latest development – XHTML – which stands for ‘extensible hypertext markup language’. Musciano and Kennedy aim to keep you up to date with these latest developments. So – what are they? XHTML is an extension to the HTML code – at 4.01 in its present version. It is in fact a part of the XML code – and XML is itself a subset of the general Standard General Markup Language (SGML). Still confused? The authors have already guessed that, and in HTML and XHTML they do their best to explain.

HTML and XHTMLWhat they do in this excellent manual is cover every element of HTML/XHTML in detail, explaining how each element works and how it interacts with other elements. Many hints about HTML/XHTML style help you write documents ranging from simple online documentation to complex presentations. With hundreds of examples, the book gives you models for writing your own effective web pages and for mastering advanced features like style sheets and frames.

When HTML was originally conceived, no one had any idea it would be so successful or be asked to handle so many kinds of documents, browsers, and media. While it has borne up admirably under the demands of web users, HTML 4.0 has stretched as far as it can to accommodate new technology. While HTML 4.0 is petering out, XHTML 1.0 stands ready to step in, designed to handle almost anything web authors can dream up.

There are in fact three possibilities for XHTML – the ‘strict’ version which is limited but future-proof; the ‘transitional’ version which allows authors to write with current browsers in mind; and a third version which deals with frames. The reassuring news they offer is that “learning HTML is still the way to go for most authors and Web developers” – but they do remind readers that “content is paramount; appearance is secondary”.

They also warn that “writing XHTML documents requires much more discipline and attention to detail than even the most fastidious HTML author ever dreamed necessary.” This sounds a bit frightening – but really, it just means being extra careful with coding. It means that all tags must be opened, then closed. No more leaving out those </P> paragraph tags.

And the beauty of this book is that all the basic HTML coding is covered in the great detail which has been generated over its earlier editions. They deal with forms, frames, tables, and even Java scripts, and all the tutorial material is fully illustrated, with plenty of screenshots and understandable code.

All the really useful appendices are there too – HTML grammar, Cascading Style Sheets, the HTML and XHTML document definitions, character entities, color names and values, and of course a complete list of XHTML tags with browser compatibility notes.

If you want the very best reference manual to HTML and its latest developments – this is it. I guarantee that no matter which other web page design books you might have on your shelves, this is the one to which you will keep coming back – again and again.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Chuck Musciano & Bill Kennedy, HTML& XHTML: The Definitive Guide 6th edition, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2006, pp.654, ISBN: 0596527322

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HTML with CSS and XHTML

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web design using style sheets and the latest standards

This is an unusual guide to HTML and web design, because it teaches via chat and fun, not boring routines. It’s aimed at beginners who want to get web pages up on to a site, but who don’t want to be bored rigid with long lists of ‘elements’, ‘attributes’, and ‘selectors’. The authors use instead just about every printable device for getting their lessons across: explanations, diagrams, screenshots, cartoons, bulleted lists, quizzes, dialogues, crosswords, tests, and downloadable templates. They also teach predominantly via pictures, which is one reason the book is so long (658 pages). The other reason is that it’s so comprehensive.

HTML CSS XHTMLThey cover basic HTML, then XHTML, interactivity, and style sheets. In fact they take the unusual step of introducing style sheets right at the start. This approach of multiple instruction produces quite a lot of repetition and redundancy – but I’ve no quibble with that. It’s based on the sound pedagogic principle the when you are learning, several approaches are better than one.

Geared towards both Mac and Windows users, they show you how to design pages, how to insert graphics, how to validate your pages to check for problems and make the pages compliant with W3C standards.

I still find the language of stylesheets over-abstract and hard to grasp, but they explain it all very carefully, and most importantly they show you both what to type into your text editor and how it will look in a browser.

There are a couple of easier chapters on styling with fonts and colours, then it’s back to the harder stuff with CSS elements and the box mode – which is similar to HTML tables. Here there are some very useful detail on how browsers deal with the information coded into your pages, some of which explains why you can’t always get things to appear on screen how you want them to look.

They end with chapters on tables and forms – still urging readers not to fall back on old HTML 4.0 tricks for layout and appearance, but to stick with style sheets all the way.

So – truth be told, it’s a book which starts off quite easily, but then gradually becomes more advanced. But if you do all the exercises and tests along the way, this gradual acceleration should be hardly noticeable.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Elisabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman, Head First: HTML with CSS and XHTML, Sebastopol: CA, 2005, pp.658, ISBN 059610197X

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HTML: The Definitive Guide

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the encyclopaedia of HTML coding and web design

Most people in the academic and business world are still using HTML Standard 2.0 browsers – partly because of corporate lethargy and partly because upgrading is so costly and disruptive in big organisations. At least these people have had the good fortune to miss out the Standard 3.0 phase, which was something of a dog’s breakfast. Designers however (the people who actually create the Web pages for our consumption) are always keen to make the screen more attractive and escape the confine of earlier standards. In fact they have a doubly difficult job. They might wish to adopt the latest features, but if their sites are to be viewable by people still lumbered with older browsers, they are also under constraint to make their pages ‘backwardly compatible’. This is no easy task.

HTML: The Definitive Guide The first edition of Musciano and Kennedy’s book on HTML was rather boldly entitled The Definitive Guide. However, many of the predictions they made then have been substantiated by subsequent meetings of the W3C committee, which decides on these standards. [It’s recently been rumoured that both Microsoft and Netscape try to pack this committee with their appointees.]

The third edition of their reference manual offers an update which includes the latest additions to Standard 4.0 of the official HTML code. They claim that this is a ‘clearer and cleaner standard’ than any previous, but they also admit that Netscape and Microsoft incorporate features not included in the present standard. Fortunately, they take a realistic view of this browser war and make clear which standards are adopted (or not) by the Big Two. So what’s really new here?

The answer is ‘Quite a lot’. The Forms, Tables, and Frames chapters have all become bigger, and JavaScript and DHTML make an appearance. They also cover Layers, Multiple Columns, and creating white space. The big new item of course is a whole chapter on Cascading Style Sheets – a development which has come about precisely because of the shortcomings in standards 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 – and they recognise in this respect that print publications just can’t keep up with Web developments (which is a brave and honest admission for authors of computer manuals). A section on image formats (.gif and .jpg) is also new – but beware! there are Netscapisms at every turn.

I still find it difficult to remember what is an attribute, a physical style, and why some tags are ‘deprecated’. They even include some which are now obsolete (for historical reasons) which just goes to illustrate their thoroughness. However, you still have to be prepared for a rather abstract manner of expression:

like most other tagged segments of content, user-related events can happen in and around the BLOCK QUOTE tag

But having used the first edition regularly over the last year or two, I can confirm that their manner of writing is amply compensated by the reliability of the advice they offer.

Obviously you should buy this latest edition, but it’s reassuring to know that Musciano and Kennedy continue to offer a guide which stays within the limits of the latest HTML standard, whilst recognising that you will want to go beyond it. In this regard the publisher generously offers an online update.

The usual high quality O’Reilly production values obtain: good quality paper, clear print, consistent layout, and their elegant house font of ITC Garamond. Multiple indexes include HTML grammar, quick tag reference, CSS quick reference, the HTML 4.0 document type definition, character entities, and colour names and values. To a newcomer these might seem like boring technical catalogues – until you see the horror of your Web pages in a browser you don’t normally use. Then you’ll be glad of the reassurance of safe colours and the correct ASCII number for that ampersand or angled bracket.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Chuck Musciano & Bill Kennedy, HTML: The Definitive Guide (sixth edition) Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2006, pp.678, ISBN 0596527322

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