Hanging a Home Page,
the Easy Way, Part Two

Book Review

by Yves Barbero

HTML for the World Wide Web, Second Edition, by Elizabeth Castro.
a Peachpit Press Visual Quickstart Guide (Berkeley), 255 pages, paper, $17.95.

Peachpit Press
Cookwood Press (Elizabeth Castro's site)

A lot of things have changed since I wrote the review of the First Edition in these pages well over a year ago. In fact, this simple guide has more than 80 additional pages and covers most of the new HTML 3.2 protocols.

Its original virtues are still there. It is simple and straightforward (and costs the same $18). But it deserves a fresh look (For those who want to see the first review for comparison purposes, click here). If you bought the First Edition, go ahead and buy this one. The additional information makes it all worthwhile. You can give the First Edition away (as I did to a friend's daughter who set up a site - a work in continuous progress) since all the original material, with a few corrections, is still there.

This is nuts and bolts stuff. In theory, you can code HTML using a simple ASCII editor like NotePad in Windows, or QEdit in DOS. Of course, no one but crazy purists do that. There's a rush to use the WordPerfect or MS Word add-ons for HTML. People also buy Microsoft's FrontPage program. I use HotDog Pro 2.0 which is basically an ASCII editor with a lot of macros. I could never figure out how to use HotDog's later version, Luddite that I am. Besides, version 3.0, intended mostly for Windows 95, kept crashing on me.

Control is why I prefer the straightforward HTML coding approach. I can absolutely determine everything, pixel by pixel, from line height to spacing by using the information found in Elizabeth Castro's superb guide. I've seen FrontPage output. For the most part, users don't get into the fine tuning of the program and so it looks crude and unprofessional, or, if they use one of the excellent templates FrontPage provides, it doesn't give the user the creative or unique options an individual should demand. All those web pages look alike. So even if you're sold on a program such as FrontPage, Castro's book is good to read. After all, you can pop into the coded page that FrontPage outputs and make adjustments. Although FrontPage does provide for a complex potential, does it make any sense to go through that learning curve? To me, it makes more sense to know the basics and have the potential use of a variety of approaches (including other programs). I suspect that the basics take less time to learn as well. FrontPage is very difficult to use if you want a tight control of your web site.

As a user of WordPerfect 8.0 (and all previous versions from 4.2 on), I often "save as" in HTML, pop the page into HotDog 2.0, and edit out what I don't like and thus refine the page. That's because I have a good grounding in HyperText Markup Language thanks in large part to Castro's book. The Second Edition has almost made the "three feet" of HTML books I spoke about in the first review obsolete. I hardly have to crack them. Castro has neatly summarized almost everything you need. Another Peachpit Press book, "JavaScript for the World Wide Web" by Gesting and Schneider (192 pages), $17.95, pretty much covers those needs, and only professionals and the curious need to get into JavaScript to do web authoring.

Castro's book has some defects. The Figures are a bit hard to see if, as I do, you wear the bottom of coke bottles to see properly. I use a magnifying glass on occasion. Peachpit should probably issue the next edition in a larger format. I'd also like to see a companion CD so I don't have to retype their samples. I don't mind paying extra. But these are minor considerations and should not distract you from buying this excellent guide.

The book covers the basics, text formatting, images, page layouts, making lists and tables (all excellent), frames (very well) and forms (not so well), style sheets and something called "Extras." I read "Extras" a few times since it has information that was genuinely novel, such as how to "steal" ideas from other web sites.

Castro also tells you how to post using the most common approaches (Fetch for Macintosh and WS_FTP for Windows) as well as AOL and CompuServe methods. I find WS_FTP the cat's meow for uploading to the net since it covers 99% of my posting needs. It is freeware for noncommercial users. It can be downloaded from literally hundreds of web sites. She has some information on UNIX, the language of the web, probably all you really need. There are dozens of good UNIX tutorials on the net if you require more information. I found the book "UNIX for DOS Users" by Martin R. Arick, Ph.D. (230 pages), $24.95, John Wiley & Sons, particularly useful, especially the tables at the back that compare commands between the two operating systems. DOS is, after all, the bastard child of UNIX and CPM. The family resemblance is there for all to see.

The author offers good advice on choosing HTML editors, certainly more in the mainstream than my opinions, and she has a color hex charts, a summary of HTML tags, and special symbols lists that are all well-thumbed in my copy.

She writes in a clear, almost breezy (non-nerd) style. It doesn't feel like hard work to read the book, even for an old pocket-protector type like me. If you don't want to inhabit the Microsoft ghetto the rest of your life, learning the basics of the Internet is a good way to break out, and Castro's book is certainly one of the keys.

Hanging a Home Page, the Easy Way (from 1996)

Book Review

by Yves Barbero

HTML for the World Wide Web by Elizabeth Castro. a Peachpit Press Visual Quickstart Guide (Berkeley), 176 pages, paper, $17.95.

I have about three feet of book shelf devoted to books about Internet publishing. The space contains books that explain Perl and CGI programming, as well as HTML and Java coding. In addition, a considerable amount of my hard disk space is set aside for programs that are supposed to make my life easier, but mostly don't.

Like a lot of people, I've used the shotgun approach to learning HTML publishing. Everyone I've questioned has tried to be helpful, and some people have actually helped. But web publishing can be approached from many angles. The novice, even if he or she is sophisticated in other computer matters, doesn't always know what is needed or even what he or she wants. The question is often what questions to ask.

Suppose, for whatever reason, you want to have your own homepage. How do you start?

Some services invite you to use their graphic interface, and it can work pretty well. But then you're trapped in their service, because it is unique, and can't easily move around. It's much better to learn some of the basic HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and code off-line. You'll find it's a lot cheaper as well.

If a service charges $2 an hour after a small minimum, you can easily accrue a lot of charges working on-line. It's not uncommon for a decent web page, with lots of local and remote links, even in the hands of someone experienced, to take forty or more hours to code. My first web page, with lots of links, took over 60 hours to do. Only a couple of hours of that was actually on-line. My second page, actually simpler, took about six hours on-line, because that service required publishing while actually on-line instead of simply uploading it using the Internet's file transfer protocol. This was the case, despite the fact that I had done 99 percent of the coding in advance. I had to make a special effort to get around expensive facilities honestly designed to make it easier for the user.

Had I done it "by the book," I would have quickly gobbled up the 20 hours allowed "free" by the service, and gotten into expensive metered time. In addition, their on-line help required logging on to the service. This is slow, and metered.

Elizabeth Castro's book is a genuinely useful tool. It's under 200 pages long, well written, and about as complete as you could expect. It took me a couple of hours to read it, and though somewhat experienced, I learned quite a bit from it. If you're a complete novice, expect to spend a lot more time than that. Your first cold turkey page should take you 20 to 30 hours. Don't worry about it. It's time well spent.

HTML coding is not just a learning process, but a process of culturalization. It genuinely helps to "surf" the web, looking at what others have done. If you are not presently on the Internet, get on a service and "surf" for a month or so before starting to code. (Netcom, Earthlink, and Hooked are good cheap ways to start since they all pretty much give you unlimited usage. I use Earthlink.)

Castro tells you how to intelligently sleuth the web for information. She suggests a number of approaches, including the use of a simple ASCII editor to create your own page. Take it from someone who, at first, couldn't make heads or tails out of the various HTML authoring tools, this is a good approach. Naturally, if you're experienced with word processors, you'd create macros for the various tags, and would know how to save in ASCII (DOS text).

She goes further than many of similar "thin" startup books in giving advice on how to use editors and filters, as well as other utilities. She has a list of authoring tools, all good, at the back of the book. I settled on Hot Dog Pro, which is not listed in her book (You can download a trial version at http://www.sausage.com), but look at as many as you like. She even suggests some approaches to finding a service to hang your pages on. They're all different, but the approach is similar.

The book is valuable for another reason. She takes the time to explain why some procedures are done despite the fact that you can't always see the results. Much of HTML, while obvious when you know the reason, is counterintuitive if you don't, and can be the cause of confusion. Stuff that looks wonderful in Netscape, is invisible in other browsers. I have taken to looking at my work in at least three dissimilar browsers. I learned that trick by hard experience. You can save yourself that, and other aggravations by a close reading of her book.

Plunk down your money. This one is a winner.

Appendix: Four ways to publish a web site

1. The pure approach. Learn everything you can and write the page from scratch. Find a service, and upload your page. This is probably the most time consuming way, but certainly requires a lot of knowledge up front. Castro's book is a good start. You'll need to understand some basic Unix, and CGI. You'll certainly get the page you visualize better than any other way (I found that very satisfying). This is how I wrote my first web site.

   The National Center for Science Education

   http://www.natcenscied.org

   If you plan on doing more than one web site, it is the onlyway to go.

2. The unique graphics approach. This non-standard approach is probably okay if you have no curiosity, and don't mind being stuck with one service (it can get expensive). You don't need to learn much HTML for this. It's also limiting in what graphics you use, and how your page looks. Although the service I was using to hang my second page only allowed publishing through this system, I found a way around it.

3. The hybrid approach. This is how I originally published my second web site on GNN. I wrote the pages using the pure approach, and then modified the way I uploaded them by importing them into their system. This requires some knowledge of Unix directory structure. Castro's book provides much of this information. Knowing the DOS file system, or how to use the file manager in Windows is essential. Below is the site I wrote using this system. I have since moved to Earthlink because it allows the pure approach.

   Yves Barbero's Web Site (You're here)

   http://www.yvesbarbero.com

4. The commercial approach. Hire someone to do it. This can become costly. A charge of $1,000 or more is not unheard of. If your business demands that corporate "look," this is a good approach. Professionals abound. Look at other sites they've done before signing on.

Go back to Second Edition Review

© Copyright 1998 by Yves Barbero

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