Re[4]: HTML Programming vs. PDF

Subject: Re[4]: HTML Programming vs. PDF
From: "Walker, Arlen P" <Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 1998 14:07:24 -0600

I have written an interactive guide to HTML and JavaScipt it's
at http://www.useractive.com/tutorial

Afraid it wouldn't work at this site, anyway. First thing I see when I
enter the site is that it doesn't work with IE3, which is the standard
browser at this site. Going in with IE4 (OK, so I'm a Mac user and
therefore not too rigid at following standards set by the Wintel crowd) I'm
quickly informed that there's a bug in IE4 and the site may not work
properly. Most of the net beginners I know would bail out at that point,
rather than risk continuing. I kept going and sure enough encountered a
script error on the page hawking his free web site hosting service. (If I
were more cynical, I'd suspect that Scott had been baiting us all just get
some exposure for the service. Noticed also something interesting in the
source. He's listed as "keywords" for the benfit of site indexing engines
the key words "money", "career,""pagemill," "sex," "furniture," and
"health" among many others. Thus ensuring that if you search the web for
someone selling sofas, for example, you'll pull up his site. This time-
honored technique is known as "spamming the search engines." Nothing
illegal about it, though it *is* considered a bit tacky. It works with most
engines except Yahoo, as Yahoo gets indexed by humans and not robots, and
so they are not likely to confuse web-hosting services with furniture
dealers. Yahoo has been known to de-list egregious offenders, but I doubt
this would qualify as such; it's fairly mild.)

As a side note, I have some anti-virus software that triggers a scan
whenever the file download area on my HD is accessed. It triggered twice
while I was sitting at his site and not clicking on anything. No idea what
caused it, but it was that activity that caused me to pull up the source of
the page for a look-see.

Beyond that, it looks like a good tutorial. About on the same level as,
say, Lemay's book. I'll admit I didn't go through every page (probably hit
half the HTML tutorials and a few other random pages) but what I've seen
there is about the same experience you get when using a good HTML book and
and HTML editor like PageMill or PageSpinner.

For those that didn't take the trip, what he's done is create a frameset
with the text of the tutorial on the top and a box on the bottom which you
can type HTML into and have it rendered at the click of a button.

The differences between a book and the tutorial? With the book you don't
have scroll around as much to see the text, but it also takes up more desk
space, and some folks don't have room for books at the keyboard. Seems like
a fair trade to me.

Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 224

Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
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In God we trust; all others must provide data.
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Opinions expressed are mine and mine alone.
If JCI had an opinion on this, they'd hire someone else to deliver it.




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