HTML and Web Programming Resources

HTML and Web Programming Resources

	Java Programming Resources.		JSP/Servlet/Struts/JSF Programming Resources.

HTML Programming. HTML 4, Frames, cascading style sheets, layers, Netscape extensions, Internet Explorer extensions. Tutorials, book lists, etc.
HTML Editors. Reviews and download sites.
HTML Validators. On-line and downloadable validators and page analysis tools.
General HTML Resources. Links to some HTML and Web-design resources.
Free Web Graphics. Freely available images for use on Web pages.
Using FTP to Upload/Download Web Pages.

Java. Java tutorials, documentation, download sites, books, FAQs, etc.
JavaScript. Guides, documentation, script collections, resources, JavaScript security sites, etc.
Core Web Programming Best-selling book covering HTML, Java, and JavaScript. Free source code and online chapters in PDF.
Browsers. Netscape, IE, Opera, and Mozilla.

HTML Programming

Reference Sites
- The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Official reference site on HTML, HTTP, and related Web technologies.
- The Web Design Group. One of the best tutorial and help sites on HTML and Web design.

General Specifications
- HTML 4.01. The official W3C recommendation. This site has the complete specifications for HTML, outlines all of the tags and usages for HTML, and provides a complete Table of Contents.
- HTML and XHTML Homepage. The official W3C Homepage for HTML. Contains news tutorials, slides, specs, etc.
- Frames. Official HTML-frames spec.
- HTML Tidy. This site helps fix up HTML documents that are loaded with mistakes
- HTML supported by Netscape Navigator. Since each browser can support its own individual tags that it wants, here are the tags that are supported by Netscape. Also see the Netscape HTML Central.
- Internet Explorer's page on HTML and Web Development
Style Sheets and Layers
- Style Sheet Homepage. There are two kinds of style sheets, Cascading for HTML, and XSL for XML. This is the Style Sheet Homepage.
- Cascading Style Sheets home page. Official CSS site at the WWW Consortium.
- Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2.1 Current version.
- Cascading Style Sheets, Level 3 Trial version, currently under construction.
- Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1
- Cascading Style Sheets Validator. Validates your CSS that is online, in your files, and what you type into their text area.

Tutorials/References
- The W3C Tutorials. Contains over twenty tutorials, many for complete beginners, and on many different topics, such as HTML, CSS, etc. Also contains slides and links to other tutorials.
- Web Design Group's HTML References. Includes excellent sections on HTML 4.0, HTML 3.2 (Wilbur), and Cascading Style Sheets. Comes in Spanish, Japanese and Chinese too.
- Bare Bones Guide to HTML. From Kevin Werbach. Includes HTML 4.0 as well as Netscape and Microsoft extensions. Comes in 25 languages.
- NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML. Updated to HTML 4.0.
Books
- Marty's Favorite Java and Web Programming Books. Not a comprehensive list of available books, but rather my personal favorites in a variety of areas.
- Comprehensive List of HTML Books. From Cye Waldman.
- List of CGI and Perl books. Also from Cye Waldman.
- List of Books on servers and for Webmasters. Also from Cye Waldman.
- List of HTML Books from BigWebMaster.

Tools to help you write HTML. An HTML editor is a program that helps make writing HTML easier. The editors specifically for HTML have WYSIWYG modes that let you edit the page graphically without manipulating the HTML tags explicitly. The regular programming editors provide HTML syntax highlighting and some helpful tools, but require you to work directly with the HTML tags. If your goal is to learn HTML, start with a regular programming editor. The style sheet editors provide tooltips for all the legal style sheet properties, and show you a preview of each style you define.

Editors Specifically for HTML
- Macromedia Dreamweaver. Expensive but very powerful. Costs approximately $300.
- Microsoft FrontPage. Easier than Dreamweaver for beginners, but results in HTML that is much less standard. Costs about $200.
- Adobe GoLive Popular editor from Adobe. Goes for approximately $400.
- NetObjects Fusion. Goes for approximately $140.
- HotDog Professional. From Sausage Software. Goes for approximately $100.
Regular Programming Editors.
Even if you don't use a Web-site development tool like Dreamweaver or GoLive, a good programming editor that knows a bit about HTML syntax is a big plus. See this list for some good options like TextPad, UltraEdit, and emacs.
Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Editors.
- TopStyle. Very nice, easy to use editor that shows a preview of every style. The "Lite" version is totally free and still very useful.
- Just Style CSS Editor Powerful, easy to use, and free
- Style Studio CSS Editor. Powerful editor that comes with a validator, designs, Office GUI, and more.
- W3C's CSS Editor List Contains the WWW Consortium's List of CSS Editors.

HTML Validators

On-Line Validation Services
- The Web Design Group's validator. Validates online files, files on your computer, or HTML that you type into their form. Allows for advanced options like show input and validate whole site. For each error it gives you a link on what the error cause is, and if you click on the actual error, it jumps to the place of your input which has the error. Easy to use.
- The WWW Consortium's validator. Validates online files, or files on your computer, allows for advanced options like showing input and parse tree. For each error it gives a brief explanation of what the error is. However, this validator will give you a warning if you don't specify the language encoding, even though the HTML specification clearly says that you are not required to (and few developers do!).
Validators to Download.
- "Real" validator from Liam Quinn. Uses official SGML definition like the on-line validators.
- CSE 3310 Validator.
Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Validators
- The WWW Consortium's validator. The same style as their HTML validator, but allows you to type into their form.
- The Web Design Group's validator. The same style as their HTML validator; very easy to use.
Dr. HTML. Not a formal validator, but rather a helpful tool that checks download time, links, image formats, and other useful info. Makes some outright errors when checking syntax, however.

General HTML and Web Programming Resources

HTML Resources and Link Collections
- The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
- The Web Design Group.
- HTML Writer's Guild.
- Yahoo's HTML Collection.
- The Big WebMaster Contains plenty of HTML and Web resources, besides thousands of templates.
- WebHostingStuff.com. Big list of Web development resources and Web hosting providers.
- Web hosting providers that support servlets and JSP.
404 ("Page Not Found" Error Pages) Lists
- 404Lab. Contains hundreds of unusual 404 pages grouped by topic.
- 404 lounge.

Free Web Graphics

Clip art, animated GIFs, backgrounds, bullets, etc.

Big Webmaster Huge collection (over 7000) of Web templates, sorted by topic.
Yahoo's collection of collections of graphics.
GRSites A Huge collection of over 10,000 Web graphics, 5000 Web backgrounds, 6000 fonts, 1900 sound effects, and more.
Realm graphics collection. Very extensive.
GIF Construction Set for Windows. For creating your own animated GIFs.
Freely available animated GIFs. From Mike Shaikun.
Anime GIFs paranoia. A large selection of animated anime GIFs (including 12 pages on DragonBall Z).

Using FTP to Transfer Files

If you have created Web pages and you want to send them somewhere to put them up on the Web, you can do it using FTP. There are three basic ways to FTP:

The first way is to FTP through the command console. This is done on Windows by clicking the start button, run, and typing in CMD. Then you type in ftp DestinationPlace, click enter, and supply your user name and password as prompted. Then you can use commands to view your directory and to transfer you file (see details).
The second way is to use a graphical FTP client. Here are some choices:
- The WS_FTP from IPSWITCH.
- FTP software from Sofotex.
- A free Java-based FTP client from Rad Inks.
The third way is to use Internet Explorer. You use a URL of the form ftp://userName:password@DestinationPlace. Then, you can drag and drop files to/from your desktop. See Microsoft's FTP support document. This approach is very simple, but Internet Explorer sometimes changes the capitalization of filenames, so be careful.

Using FTP through the command console	Using Internet Explorer to FTP

Using a GUI FTP

JavaScript

Documentation	Script Collections and Resources	JavaScript Security Info
JavaScript Central. Netscape site with lots of useful info. Go here first. JavaScript Documentation from Netscape. Includes JavaScript 1.1 Guide JavaScript 1.2 Reference What's New in JavaScript 1.2 Also LiveConnect (Java-JavaScript integration), LiveWire (server-side JavaScript), ECMAScript, security, and other JavaScript resources. JScript Documentation from Microsoft. Accessing Java from JavaScript. Accessing JavaScript from Java.	Chapter 19 and 20 of Core Web Programming. JavaScript Planet. From Mattias Sjoberg. Autoscripters.com (formerly Cut-N-Paste JavaScript). Yahoo's Collection of JavaScript Resources.	JavaScript security in Netscape Communicator. Official Netscape security notices. Not all of the bugs have to do with JavaScript. Official Microsoft security notices. Not all of the bugs have to do with JScript.

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