25th April 2001
"Tag -- you're it!" No, this isn't a game; it's the Web. When it works, it's fun -- but when it doesn't work, we coders have to work harder to make it work. See, HTML documents are comprised of tags. Really simple, actually. Entering a "B" within the less-than and greater-than symbols will begin the bolding of text. Is that the tip? Not quite. Troubleshooting Web page problems takes a trained eye. Color coding can help, which is why I've started to recommend COLORMYHTML.COM for your tool belt. Aha! Suddenly, you'll see that you forgot to close that italic (or exactly where your table took a turn for the worse). From experience, I'll tell you that Internet Explorer is far more forgiving with coding mistakes than is Netscape. Is that a good thing? I've heard it argued both ways. However, since I'm human (and I know that you are, too), I'd rather deal with someone who could look past my typing imperfections. If you're just starting to get into Web page creation, I'd suggest working with a WYSIWYG editor. That being said, understanding the underlying code is imperative.