General Coding Help - HTML Forums

philhoyt · 02-02-2010, 02:42 PM

Hello,
I have just recently got started back into coding web again and the last time i did coding all we ever used were tables. Well its been a few years now and I have been relearning how to code using divs and starting to get the hang of it.
So here is my situation.
I was asked to recreate this page:
http://www.terryberry.com/
as close as possible using divs instead of tables.

This is what I have done so far:
http://philhoyt.com/dev/terryberry_forum/
download with all contents:
http://philhoyt.com/dev/terryberry_forum.zip

There are tons of error. Doesn't seem to work right in IE yet and all sorts of other problems.
Now I'm not asking anyone to fix all the problems I am having.
I'm asking if someone with more experience on this page can tell if I'm going in the right direction of recoding this page?
If not what would be a better approach? Do you have any tutorials, references, books, anything!? That could help ease my transition and learning curve of web design?

Cheers
Phil

cascading-style · 02-02-2010, 08:37 PM

Well, first of all, I will make a plain statement..despite your Div effort, which is good, your code in general is horrid. Sorry..

Anyway, you will want to learn a few things:

1. Use a document type at the beginning of your webpage. Don't know what that is? Visit W3School's tutorial on it. If you are unsure about XHTML, just go to the "XHTML Introduction" link on the left sidebar of that page

2. You shouldn't use an <html> tag with the xmlns, xml:lang, and lang attributes, and only those. This is because of the XHTML 1 Standard.

HTML Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
</html>

3. Instead of jamming all of your CSS into the HTML page, create an external CSS stylesheet

Other than that, your code looks OK. Here's what the W3C validator thinks about your code, and gives you some advice on how to change it and live up to standards:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...Inline&group=0

Also, remember XHTML? Try putting in the Doctype and correct <html> info I recommended, and see if you pass for XHTML 1.0 Strict.

philhoyt · 02-02-2010, 09:19 PM

thank you! and don't be sorry! I take criticism very well.
this is the file i update constantly
http://philhoyt.com/dev/terryberry_2/
I ran it through validate and went from 54 errors to 4 and a warning so I would say I'm doing a lot better now.

how to you recommend I break up the css? I know how to make external style sheets just figured I would ask if you had any particular way.

thanks for the help.

cascading-style · 02-03-2010, 07:54 PM

Not really, other than organizing them by what they are, for example containers here, text stuff here, image stuff here, etc. You can put comments like this

Code:

/* ---------------------------------------- */

to seperate them. It's pretty much just the designer's choice, though.