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Wikipedia. If that's too advanced, you can always try UrbanDictionary (html = how to meet ladies).

Seriously though, I've seen people get basic literacy in HTML in a few hours. There are a lot of details beyond that, figuring out how to get things exactly where you want them on the page, how to deal with browser incompatibilities...........plenty of things that take a while to learn. But basic literacy in HTML? Start here, or maybe here.

I'm not sure how you missed the point so spectacularly.

Not only is there CSS to do the things people used tables, for, but table has always been an abuse of the semantic intent of that HTML document tag, muddying it and confusing parsers. Yes, HTML could use more tags, but tables are hardly necessary.

And setting aside the semantics, people who actually have to restyle your table layout later (when rewriting the site is not an option) will have every reason to curse you.

The decoupling of the layout CSS offers is a powerful tool.

And, no, web pages are not, and have never been intended to be, mapped to application UIs. Is nice that they can, but that's a very limited case, and not even the main use of web pages.

"Explore the intricacies of HTML and CSS here: http://www.htmlhelp.com/ , http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ , http://www.brainjar.com/ , http://www.htmldog.com/ , http://css.maxdesign.com.au/"
-- ZofBot db

HTML/CSS: http://htmldog.com/

Very clear and to the point for the basics - its a great quick reference for those too lazy or uninterested who still write code for the web.

Seriously consider a newer technique.

There's actually no way to adjust tracking in CSS that I know of.

letter-spacing should work...

I think you're the confused one. The OP talked about h1 not about head. Why did your reply mention head? It's ok, nobody's pointing fingers here. As I said, it's a common newbie error. Just to help, h1 is for big headline-style things - ya know like in newspaper. Head, well... it's the head! (Basically, don't worry about the head, you'll be using h1 (and it's siblings - h2 and h3) much more).

Here's another link to help you - HTML Beginner Tutorial

Sorry, I said it this way because the Linux Version and the Windows version act alike while I've had some difficulty with the Mac version.

To give another example of what worries me on Mac Firefox: Take IE for example. I use SuckerFish Menu's on a some of my pages. The great thing about them is that they use the css standard. A bit of javascript fixes IE problems so they works. It also will layout on other devices that don't support CSS well (A BlackBerry for instance). But on IE (It's works on 7 actually), the select box which is an OS native widget insists on floating above everything else including my menu's.

I really don't want to see these kind of problems on the Mac client. My worry is the OS native widgets will lead to this kind of problem.

I think they should go ahead and change the look and feel of the Mac client if they want. Theme the widgets to look like mac widgets, and even make them act like Mac widgets (keyboard shortcuts and such). Just don't use the OS's native widgets. I believe it will just lead to more bugs in the Mac version that are not in the other versions.

Too bad you apparently never discovered Suckerfish - let's do pretend to have :hover (and other) pseudoclasses on any element in IE6 thanks to a bit of javascript. I know part of the joy of pure CSS :hover is no javascript is needed, but this is very clean...

• Be prepared to abandon hope of absolute pixel-level control over everything. Seriously, if you want that, go into print design, that's not how the web works.
• (Sometimes this one works as an OR to the above point...) Fix the box model by adding an extra non-semantic div. Simple as that. Voila, no more broken box model, but no invalid CSS full of Tantek hacks either. I don't know why more webdesigners are so against this. Banging on about favouring standards, yet they'd rather deliberately break (invalidate) their own CSS than add a single non-semantic wrapper div? I never quite grasped that. The broken IE box model is responsible for the vast majority of places where pixel-accurate control breaks down between IE and, well, the rest. Of course, it doesn't help fix your 3-pixel jog (for example), but it certainly cuts out the biggest offenders.
• Be prepared to lose a few bells and whistles - for example, no :hover pseudoclass on arbitrary elements. So you can't have table cells that change color as you mouseover. This is pure candy though, so I'm prepared to "not support" IE in this regard. The overall layout/style is exactly the same, so it's not like I'm making IE degrade to "plain, unformatted hypertext" as you suggest - just they miss a few tiny "cherry on top" effects.
• (Again this is a bit of an OR to the previous point) - use javascript. For example, get the effect of arbitrary :hover by using suckerfish javascript techniques.

Capitalisation, with the exception of the first letter of sentences, proper nouns, and acronyms, is a presentation effect. That is to say, your data should use proper capitalisation and only when presenting it should you modify that. (To give an example, this is what font-variant and text-transform are for in CSS.) Allow me to put it another way: the authoritative instance of information should always be in the correct form, and you can mangle it to your hearts content after that. And since we do that programmatically, there is never any reason for someone to create data replete with capital letters. Hence no need for the caps lock key.

Capitalisation, with the exception of the first letter of sentences, proper nouns, and acronyms, is a presentation effect. That is to say, your data should use proper capitalisation and only when presenting it should you modify that. (To give an example, this is what font-variant and text-transform are for in CSS.) Allow me to put it another way: the authoritative instance of information should always be in the correct form, and you can mangle it to your hearts content after that. And since we do that programmatically, there is never any reason for someone to create data replete with capital letters. Hence no need for the caps lock key.

Hi,
Been a browser of slashdot for years. Just joined to help you out.

Check out : http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdow ns/example/
for an example of a cross browser clean list menu with no .htc

details of how it work can be found:
http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdow ns/

I modified the code and made a version for my employer that worked on all IE5's including mac, IE6, Firefox, Opera. Its very nice menu. It uses javascript to allow hover in IE. .htc files often create a security warning in IE.

hope this helped.

-Ryan

Hi,
Been a browser of slashdot for years. Just joined to help you out.

Check out : http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdow ns/example/
for an example of a cross browser clean list menu with no .htc

details of how it work can be found:
http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdow ns/

I modified the code and made a version for my employer that worked on all IE5's including mac, IE6, Firefox, Opera. Its very nice menu. It uses javascript to allow hover in IE. .htc files often create a security warning in IE.

hope this helped.

-Ryan

Not only is there a standard way in the English language to do this (using parenthesis after spelling it out), there's an HTML way to do it. Tada, the <acronym> tag.

• CSS Wiki! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Centering advice! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Centering advice! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Fix crappy MSIE support! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• tips, tricks and good practice techniques! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Box model Illustrated! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• links collection! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• links collection! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• links collection! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Tutorials, Demos, and Hacks! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Best Practices! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Best Practices Crib Sheet! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Best Practices! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Holly Hack! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• 3 pixel hack! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Firefox webdev plugin! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Mozilla CSS editor! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Debugging Advice! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Page Building Process! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• selectutorial! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Lists

• listamatic 2 (nested lists)! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• listamatic! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• listutorial! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Piped List! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Floats

• floatutorial! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• float-theory! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Filtering

• Explorer! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• safari filtering! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• filters! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Type Issues

If you design your site utilising non-pixel based measurements (mm, pts or relative such as %) then they will scale to the appropriate size that best fits the resolution of the target browser and platform.

And before everyone starts going on about images not scaling, I would strongly recommend that you read alistapart's article on Elastic Design, and check out the Demonstration page. Resize the text and watch the whole site scale...

XHTML is a misleading name. Essentially all XHTML is is simply an XML document type -it has a schema, and, yes, it is theoretically extensible just like any XML document. The extensions are known as releases -XHTML 1.0 vs. XHTML 1.1, which have different schemas.

The individual web developer will not extend XHTML in any fashion (he can, but then it's not of the same document type anymore and will therefore not work with the clients (browsers)).

XHTML is mostly a subset of HTML (although one or two new tags are defined also). See here for all XHTML 1.1 tags.

The reason for XHTML's existence is that HTML concentrates (heavily) on presentation as well as structure, and it was felt that this should not be. So XHTML defines the structure of a given document and leaves any presentation of that data to some other entity (like any good XML document)*. The presentation layer is called CSS or Cascading Style Sheets.

* I don't mean that an XML document can't define presentation per se -what I mean is that a good XML document does one thing and one thing only: presents some data in a structured manner (for example, this post contains a MemberName, Subject, Text, ModerationScore and so on). There's nothing that prevents using XML to describe presentation, but it should not be presentation -that's a very important distinction. So theoretically an XHTML file describing the structure of the document could be accompanied by another XML file that described how it was to be presented, but at least for now that task has been given to CSS. For information about XML as presentation description, you can take a look at XUL from Mozilla.