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Oct
30th

Character Entities in HTML and Other Advice

Author: Editor | Files under HTML Tutorials
Tags for this article: , , , , ,

Some characters are actually reserved in HTML which should be replaced with character entities. A number of signs such as greater than or less than cannot be used because the browser will treat them for mark up. If anyone all around the world wants to put these symbols then he or she must use character entities in the actual HTML source. These entities are fixed and you will have to put fixed characters. These entities are like symbols which are to be remembered whenever you are putting some signs online. You can easily find all the character entities online which make the job much easier.

At first you will face some difficulty but gradually you will get used to it and these are easy to remember as well. There is a disadvantage as well because all browsers may not support these entities but most of them do support. One of the most common and important entities in HTML is the non breaking space. HTML normally truncates spaces that you will put in the text and sometimes you really want to put spaces with a purpose. Even if you put 5 spaces in your text HTML will automatically remove 4 spaces out of them. In order to use spaces between text you will have to use   character entity.

Following are some of the most commonly used character entities include < which is used for less than sign. The > is used for greater than sign and ¢ is used for a cent sign. Some other very important charter entities are £ which is used for a pound and ¥ yen. The description of copyright and registered trademark is very frequently used and for putting it you will use © and ® character entities. Above mentioned are very important and remembering them will help you in many ways.

There is an entity number given to each of the entity characters which makes it even easier for you to remember it. Various other signs are important and are used very often but HTML may not support it as well. Some of the most important punctuation characters include a fraction slash which is presented through ⁄ entity and it is numbered as &#8260. Inverted exclamation mark is represented through ¡ and this entity is numbered as &#161. The trademark sign can only be represented through ™ which is numbered as ™. Another very important character entity is for a thin space which can only be displayed through  . It is numbered as   and is very commonly used as well.

On the other hand, if you are producing a website that includes mathematical symbols then you will have to use separate set of character entities. If you want to add a division sign inside the website then the character entity used is ÷ and it is numbered as ÷. The degree sign is commonly used as well which is numbered as ° and the character entity is °. Learning these character entities is very important in order to efficiently create a website.


Oct
29th

Turn Your PC into an Efficient Web Server

A web server is basically a medium for other people to view the pages you have. For enabling other people view the pages you must publish them and for publishing you need a web server. You can easily convert your PC into a web server by installing IIS or PWS. The IIS and PWS are basically free web server components and can be downloaded as well. The internet information server is basically internet based services that are used for servers created by MS. These are basically used for Microsoft Windows. IIS generally comes with Windows Vista, XP, 2000 and NT as well.

The IIS can be easily found and installed in your computer it is regarded as the best for testing web applications. The best part of IIS is that it includes ASP that is Active Server Pages. These can be used to create interactive and dynamic web applications. To further know about ASP you should study the ASP school available online. PWS or personal web server is generally used for earlier versions of Windows such as Windows NT, 98 and 95. It is very easy to install as well and is basically used for testing and developing a wide number of web applications.

The PWS is outdated and is recommended for those who are training because it has security issues related to it. Each and every version of Windows comes with a different IIS such as Windows Vista Business Enterprise and Ultimate generally comes with IIS 7. On the other hand, Windows NT Workstation works on PWS or IIS 3. Installing IIS on Windows Vista is pretty easy and you can do it by following certain easy steps which include:

* Click on the start menu and open control panel
* Programs and functions will be an option and you will have double click on it
* Then click on “Turn Windows features on or off” which is there on the left side
* Finally select the box for IIS and then click OK

After installing IIS, run a Windows update so that your computer is totally safe.

You can simply install IIS on Windows XP as and Windows 2000 as well. All you have to do is follow various steps that include:

* Click on the start button and then open the control panel
* Open the Add or Remove Programs
* You will see Add/Remove Windows Components click on it
* Then click on IIS
* Click on details
* Then select the check box for WWW services and click on OK
* Finally click on Next to install IIS on your computer

After installing IIS or PWS you can easily test it as well. For testing you will have to follow a number of steps which includes:

* Search for a folder which is called Inetpub and is located on the hard drive
* Open this folder and find another folder which is named as wwwroot
* Then create a new folder under wwwroot
* Write an ASP code and save these files named as “test1.asp”
* You should always make sure that web server is functioning
* Finally open the browser and write “http://localhost/MyWeb/test1.asp” and you can view the webpage


Oct
28th

Defining Character Sets for HTML: Important for Different Languages and Alphabets

Author: Editor | Files under HTML Tutorials
Tags for this article: , , , ,

Character sets basically decide how bytes that represent your text of the HTML document are translated into readable characters. The Windows Internet Explorer basically interprets bytes into a document as per the applied text set translations. The browser should actually know what character to use in order to display the HTML page in the right way. The character set such as ASCII used to support some time ago as it does support numbers from 0-9. Many countries may use some characters which are not the part of ASCII hence they use a default character set that is ISO-8859-1.

There are different character sets for different countries as North America, Western Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada and Africa supports ISO-8859-1 character sets. On the other hand, countries from Eastern Europe support ISO-8859-2 and are described as Latin alphabet part 2. SE Europe, Esperanto and miscellaneous other countries in the same region support ISO-8859-3 character set which is known as Latin alphabet part 3. Character set ISO-8859-4 is supported in a number of Scandinavian countries and Baltic’s. The ISO-8859-5 character set is used where Cyrillic alphabet is used such as Bulgaria, Belarus, Russia and Macedonia. Various languages that use Arabic alphabets support ISO-8859-6 character set.

The Greek language and various mathematical symbols that are derived from it support ISO-8859-7 which is also described as Latin or Greek part 7. The Nordic language supports ISO-8859-10 which is also described as Latin 6 Lappish, Nordic and Eskimo. The Japanese and Korean language is supported by ISO-2022-JP-2 and ISO-2022-KR character sets. It is not as complex as it seems but all these details are very important to know in order to define character sets. All the characters sets which are explained above are very limited in size. Hence all of them are not compatible at multilingual environments.

There is a Unicode standard which actually covers all characters, symbols and punctuations that is used all around the world. This is a very interesting and helpful standard where you can process any sort of platform, language or program. The Unicode Standard is basically developed by the Unicode Consortium. The ultimate aim is to replace the already existing character sets. The Unicode Standard has recently become a success and it is implemented in Java, XML, CORBA 3.0, WML, ECMAScript (JavaScript). It is also supported in a number of operating systems and is also supported by all modern browsers.

A number of character sets implement the Unicode and UTF-8 and UTF-16 are the most commonly used encodings. In the UTF-8 a character set can be from 1 to 4 bytes. It can also represent any sort of character that is there in the Unicode. It is the most preferred encoding for e-mail and webpages. The UTF-16 is actually a variable length character. It is actually capable of encoding Unicode repertoire. It is used in a number of major operating systems such as Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, CE and Java and .NET byte code environment as well.


Oct
27th

How and why you should use META Tags

Author: Editor | Files under HTML Tutorials
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META tags are a very important element of HTML because these can help direct large amount traffic towards your website or you can also hide a certain page from being a search engine. These META tags should be decided intelligently so that your website can be easily searched within a search engine. We can say that META tags are basically used to specify keywords, description and a page’s title. These are of various types and each type has a very important role to play.

The META Description Tag

This is one of the most important META tag and is put for influencing the readers. It generally consists of 200 to 250 characters but only a small part is displayed on the screen. When you search for something on a search engine the first thing you get is a title but this title is provided with certain information and this small description is known as the description META Tag. You are only able to read a small portion of the article and for reading the entire article you will have to click on the title and open that particular webpage. The biggest benefit of creating a META Description Tag is that it provides some control on a number of crawlers. The simplest form of doing it is taking the first sentence of your body copy and using it as a META Description Tag.

The META Keywords Tag

Another very important META Tag is the META Keywords Tag. The META Keywords Tag provides extra text for a number of crawler based search engines. These Tags are normally ignored by most of the crawlers but it can still provide you that slight edge over others. The META Keywords Tag should be decided intelligently in order to get positive results. This can be explained by an example lets suppose you had some page that was all about “car rental” and you have mentioned the same word a few times in the actual page then you should take “car rental” as the META Keywords Tag. If you follow the above mentioned step then the META Keywords Tag will definitely boost the page. On the other hand if your page does not have the words “car rental” then keeping it as a META Keywords Tag is of no use. Hence we can say that this META Tag works in conjunction with the text that you have in the body copy. But there is no guarantee that all crawlers will support it but may be a few will which will help improve the ranking of that very page.

The META Robots Tag

The META Robots Tag is very important as well. This Tag helps you to specify that some particular page should not be indexed by any search engine. You can easily keep out the spiders by adding the text in between the head tags of the page which you don’t want to get indexed. The important thing is that this META Tag is supported by all crawlers and by using it you can easily block any page that you want.


Oct
12th

Top Ten Web Designer Job Skills to Master and Improve

Author: Editor | Files under General Website Information
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If you would like to be a web developer or web designer, there are certain skills that you should be aware in order to be successful in this profession. The skills mentioned below are some of the important skills that you need to be a successful web designer.

1. HTML

For any web developer or web designer, the most important thing is HTML. If you know HTML thoroughly, you will understand how the web works and it will be important throughout for your career. For both web developers and web designers, HTML is imperative.

2. CSS

CSS is an important language for a web designer and it is an important language after HTML. CSS is the one that powers the web design and will determine page appearance. Without this, a web designer will not be able to produce innovative websites.

3. Design Sense

For any web designer, it is important to have good sense of design. Than just looking out for the colours, there is lot more things attached to it. You should be aware of design elements and the principles of basic design.

4. Ajax and JavaScript

The first interactive element of the websites is JavaScript and before learning any other language, the web developers should be always comfortable with JavaScript. You will be able to create Ajax Websites once you understand the how the JavaScript connects with the websites.

5. C++, PHP, Perl, Java or ASP

WebPages can be programmed using the language that you use. Other than the languages that are mentioned above, there are some other languages that can be used to program the WebPages. The programs include C++, PHP, Perl, Java or ASP

6. MySQL Database

For most of the Web applications, building and maintaining a database is very much essential. On the web, MySQL is one of the most popular database and even learning SQL or Access will be helpful.

7. Flash

If you would like to add vector graphics and animation, you can get it through flash. Using this, more interesting websites can be created by both web developers and web designers.

8. SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the most useful and important tool in building websites. The SEO will be affected by the way HTML is written, the content, image quality and much more.

9. Web Server Administration

If you know some things about the server that your website is running on, you will be able to solve the problems and can make your site to run better. Most of the web designers feel that they can ignore the server and you will be able to build a better site once you are aware of the server .

10. Project Management

In any profession, one of the critical jobs is project management. If you come to know how to manage a project, you will be able to keep it on track so that it will help you to endear you to all the managers with whom you work presently and in future.


Oct
7th

Uptime in Web Hosting is a Great Way to Measure the Reliability of a Hosting Provider

Author: Editor | Files under General Website Information
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Uptime is nothing but the time that a particular server has stayed up and running. Usually, this is listed as percentage. It is a great measure where the clients will come to know the efficiency of the systems of a web-hosting provider. For any web-hosting provider, the uptime is very important.

There are some problems with grading on uptime

With grading a host, the biggest problem is on their uptime and you will not have independence to verify it. You have to really take the time to verify the host if they tell you that they are providing 100% uptime.

The Uptime guarantees cab be misleading as well

Usually, the uptime guarantees are not the ones that you think. From every other agreement in hosting, unless the hosting agreement is very difficult, the guarantee on uptime works something like this:

The hosting will tell you that, they will guarantee that if the site goes down for more than three hours per month in some unscheduled outages, we will definitely refund the amount of hosting for the amount of time that you have reported that the site was very slow. They tell that the amount will be refunded once the verification is done.

Some of the other Uptime issues

Hardware vs. Software

Uptime is the one that will reflect on how long the machines that are running t he websites will stay up and running. However, the machine can be running and will be working but the website will be down. If the web server software is not maintained properly (software such as databases and PHP) for your website, you have to ensure that the hosting agreement that you sign with the web-hosting provider includes the guarantee for the software running time and hardware time as well.

Who Caused the Problem?

If at all you do something that will lead to the breakdown of the website, you have to look carefully in this matter because not all the agreements will have this term.

Getting Reimbursed

If you have determined that, the website went down with no fault on your side and if it is the fault of hardware crashing other than the software (or the software that was covered in the agreement), getting reimbursement will be very much difficult. Most of the web-hosting providers have hoops that they want you to jump through in order to claim reimbursement. They will probably hoping that you can decide the amount of effort that is put in not worth the reimbursement that you receive from the hosting provider.

Uptime is very Important

Do not be mistaken, having the web hosting service providers that will guarantee the uptime that is much better than others are. However, do not assume that if the hosting provider guarantees you 99.99% uptime so that your website will never go down. What is more likely in this is that, if your site goes down for certain period of time and then you will be reimbursed with the amount for the time that was down.


Oct
5th

Using HTML Tag Attributes: How to Correctly Use Attributes and Tags in HTML

Author: Editor | Files under HTML Basics, HTML Tutorials
Tags for this article: , , , , ,

HTML tags are the basis for web page design. For more flexibility in designing HTML were defined attributes for HTML tags to change the behaviour of a specific HTML tags. There are many cases when designing a web page if you want to change the default behaviour of tags. For example, you could change the background colour of the entire page or a section of the page. You can change the alignment of some text or a unique style for the representation of a tag.

Here are some examples of HTML attributes

HTML tag is used to change the background colour or image for the whole body from a website. Understand that browser displays the contents of the body tag on the greater part of the site. By default, the background of browsers used when the tag <body Begegnung> is white. If you want a background colour other than white, use the bgcolour attribute. The following day will change the background colour of a Web page from the default white to gray <body bgcolour = “gray”>

If you want a picture, including the background to a web page, you can use the following code:
<body Background = / images / background.gif>
This example assumes that you have specified a folder on your Web server images, and in this case, there is an image called background.gif. In the case of an image in the background when the image is not large enough to fill the entire bottom of your Web site, the browser displays the image repeated vertically and horizontally to fill the background.

Link with anchor tag

The World Wide Web, the basic benefit depends on their ability to integrate documents and on the Internet so that users with a fast connection from one side to the other side. Linking documents to HTML via the anchor (<a>) tag. The anchor tag is not in itself sufficient to say, a link to the browser, too.

<a href = http://oursponsorssite.com> Visit our Sponsors </a>
This specific HTML code intimates the browser that the text “Please you should visit our sponsors” is the anchor text of a link. When the user clicks on the anchor text, it is referred to oursponsorswebsite.com URL.

Displaying an image using the image tag

HTML pages would be pretty boring without the use of images. The need to tell the browser to find where an image is a good example of how to use the HTML attributes. The images are included. Insufficient Similar to the anchor tag above example, the tag would be alone. The attribute image tag “src” is necessary to tell the browser where to display the image, as in the following example:

“/ <img src = images / logo.gif” width = “150″>

this block of code tells the browser to place an image in the document. The browser will be directed to the image file logo.gif from the images reach the top level folder for the document. You can also specify the width attribute defined in the day.


Oct
5th

Create a Web page using HTML: Covering the Basics and Bare Minimum

This article describes how to create a web page using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). You can use the steps outlined here with a simple Web browser and Windows Notepad. However, make sure you register with HTML files. “HTML”. Notepad appends. “Txt” extension

The HTML files contain structures known as tags. Tags, text, particularly left and right hooks around like <html> or </ html>. Note: Normally, there is no space between a colon and the text. However, the rooms will be used in this article. In this way, the tags appear as text and not executed as code from a browser.

<html> mark the beginning of the code and HTML </ html> indicates the end. They can also add tags to add an additional structure. Generally, the “head” and then “body” are mentioned in the section between the tags. Thus, our single file can be written as <html> <head> </ head> <body> </ body> </ html>.

1. Add a title to the HTML file. In general, the HTML files containing a title (Note: This is not the same as the header. “Head will be presented below in step 3). Title defines the text in the “title bar” of the browser display when you make a specific page. Titles are placed in the “head” (that is, between the header and </ head>). For example, one could simply file contains the following titles: <title> this is the title </ title>

2. Add content to the site. In step 1, we set the text in the title bar of the browser window appears. However, to display text in the browser window itself, we need (this text in the body section of the file In other words, between <body> and </ body>) tag. This can be done with the paragraph tag, <p>. For example, for “HTML Web Design is an interesting area. The developer shall install a functional and useful website,” We have <p> HTML Web Design is an interesting area. The developer is required to install a site functional and useful web </ p> in the body section.

3. Add a header. Then we add header content of the paragraph. Text header is usually larger than paragraphs of text. Use the “real” size can be defined by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Although not covered here, will be CSS in the Learning mentioned HTML – Part 3 – Basic CSS formatting “section. A header can be added to the lineup <h1>. Thus we can write the following headings : <h1> HTML Web Design </ h1>

4. See code page. In general, sites on the Internet containing the constructs above (together) with a number of other encoding functions. To see the HTML used to generate a page, go for it and the View “> Select Source” or “View>” Source option menu. Using the menu, try <title> research <h1> <p> and tags on a page.

The above are the simple steps to create a webpage with the use of notepad and browser.