HTML provides two main ways to add descriptive text to page elements: the alt
attribute, and the title
attribute. While these two attributes may appear to work in a similar way, they have quite different purposes. This article takes a look at these two attributes, explores their similarities and differences, and shows how to use both attributes correctly.
Blog
Here you’ll find articles about website development, WordPress, and other topics that I’m interested in. I hope you enjoy them and find them useful. Comments and feedback are always welcome!
Styling Tables with CSS
In this tutorial, we’ll take a plain old HTML table:
… and transform it into something beautiful using nothing but CSS:
Techniques we’ll cover include:
- Adjusting the spacing, padding and margin of table cells
- Styling the borders of the table and the cells within the table
- Changing text and background colours, and using background images
- Creating alternately-coloured table rows to aid legibility
- Adding a mouse hover effect to table rows
- Styling the table caption
Getting Started with Your Web Hosting Service
You’ve done your research, you’ve picked a good hosting plan, and you’ve signed up. What’s the next step? You’ll need to orient yourself to the contents of your Web space, and learn how to upload Web pages. This tutorial shows you how.
[Read more…] about Getting Started with Your Web Hosting Service
Sharpen Your Photoshop Skills with Our New Book
From shape layers and adjustment layers through to layer comps, Smart Objects and layer masks, there’s a lot more to Photoshop layers than meets the eye. To really get the most out of Photoshop, you need to know these features inside-out, and that’s where the Photoshop CS3 Layers Bible comes in.
Written by Matt and Simon, ELATED’s in-house Photoshop experts, this book covers everything you need to know about layer techniques in Photoshop.
The book is published by Wiley, and is available online from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, as well as from all good book stores worldwide. To whet your appetite, here’s a chapter-by-chapter summary of what you’ll learn when you read the book.
[Read more…] about Sharpen Your Photoshop Skills with Our New Book
Writing HTML-compatible XHTML
As we’ve seen in other articles in this series, XHTML offers a lot of advantages over HTML. It’s stricter, cleaner, more robust, and extensible. However, some modern browsers such as Internet Explorer don’t understand XHTML; they only understand HTML 4. Fortunately, the two languages are very similar and, by bearing a few guidelines in mind, you can write valid XHTML documents that can be processed correctly by HTML 4 browsers.
XHTML Document Types
In this article you take a look at the concept of document type definitions, or DTDs, and explore the three DTDs available to you when writing XHTML documents.
Converting HTML to XHTML
In our Introducing XHTML article, we took a look at how XHTML differs from regular HTML 4. In this article, you’ll learn how to convert an HTML 4 Web page to fully standards-compliant XHTML 1.0 by working through a practical example.
Introducing XHTML
XHTML, first introduced in 2000, is billed as the successor to HTML. It’s short for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language. XHTML 1.0 is essentially a reworking of HTML 4 in XML – Extensible Markup Language. As such, HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0 are very similar.
XHTML is stricter than regular HTML, as you’ll see in a moment. While this extra strictness requires a bit more effort when creating XHTML pages, it does mean that those pages are very easy for computers to read. HTML, in contrast, is notoriously difficult for browsers to interpret — which is partly why no two browsers seem to display a Web page in the same way!
Selecting Layers in Photoshop
If you’ve used Photoshop for any length of time, you no doubt use layers fairly extensively. They’re a great way to compose a design, because they let you edit and move design elements independently of each other. (If you’re new to layers in Photoshop, take a look at our Introduction to layers tutorial.)
Of course, to edit and manipulate a layer, you need to select it. Sometimes you want to select more than one layer at once. And sometimes, if your document has lots of layers, you want to select a layer quickly by clicking it in the document window. This tutorial walks you through all these techniques, and more, and explores the myriad ways of selecting layers in Photoshop.
Choosing a Web Hosting Service
If there’s one thing there’s no shortage of on the Internet, it’s Web hosting companies. There are thousands of them. Naturally, this makes your choice somewhat bewildering when it comes to getting your site online. Which one do you pick? What if they turn out to be unreliable? What sort of service do you need? Who can you turn to for help or recommendations?
In this article we’ll address all these questions, and more. By the end of it, you’ll be able to make an informed decision about which service to go with.