Interesting HTML/CSS Wikis

• Webdesign (Wikicomplete)


• HTML (Wikia)

Listed above are some handy wikis that deal with Web Design. Some contain information about Javascript or Php, but all of them have basic information about HTML. The first site, Webdesign from Wikicomplete, has a nice amount of pages that show some more technical features about certain tags. It shows a couple ways of using certain codes. One of the big dowfalls to this wiki though is that a lot of the pages that contain tags like "strong" or "em" haven't been created. It would be nice if people can come along and create it, but the site limits it to members, mods, or admins. And since there is only 1 person total that is a member of any of the groups, it's highly doubtful he will do it him/herself. It would be nice if it was open to the public, or restricted to certain people that were allowed to make helpful pages.

The second site, HTML from Wikia has a nice layout and updated content. It doesn't contain deprecated tags. Unlike the first site, this one is open to the public. Though there are only about 44 pages, this site looks promising if someone was willing to make a bunch of pages.

MediaWiki book report

Mediawiki, published by O’Reilly Media is a wonderful book to read if you are just starting out and learning how to use the Mediawiki software. In my opinion, it doesn’t seem to help a lot for the more advanced users who already know how to set up a basic wiki. The book covers three main topics. The first part is a general overview of what wikis are, and how to use one. The second is a more in depth reading on how to edit articles, organize pages and use templates. It’s basically more code centered than the last part. The final section is for people who want to make their own wiki, or be the administrator. It talks about installing the wiki on your website, doing maintenance and bug fixes, and overall controlling users and group.

I know a fair bit about wikis since I am active in one for a game I play, but I still have been able to find this book real handy. A lot of the editing basics and template usage has been memorized, but some of the things not used often like transcluded pages, using short urls, and editing the overall layout of the wiki so it is not default, tend to be for non basic users and the book acts as a quick reference guide with an organized table of contents. The weak points behind the book however are its lack of thorough details when describing how to do some things. For instance, under the index, under ‘Bots’, there’s a page that it says is “Creating a Bot”, but on the page it is only a brief 2 short paragraphs that talk about what the API is and it gives you a link to a site that talks about how they work but it never explains the step by step guide on how to make one. It also talks about some extensions (Parserfunctions, and DPL) which are really handy for a wiki. Although, it doesn’t explain that these aren’t part of the package that you download so you have to download them separately. All in all, the book explains the basic to semi-basic features pretty thoroughly, but is a little lacking when explaining something more advanced. It is to be expected since the book doesn’t have a big bunch of pages that it could have had.

One of the strong points of this Mediawiki book is that it doesn’t just give you a few numbered steps saying, “Do this, then do that, then do this and it should work.” The book explains what some features are, gives you examples and shows you what the result will be. It teaches you the background to editing something so you know how it works vs. how to just implement something knowing nothing about it. After reading this book, I feel like it would be beneficial, if you’re going to continue using mediawiki, to look at other more in depth books about Mediawiki and Wikis in general. Hopefully they might explain some of the things that this book has lacked.

Deprecated Tags (part 2)

This is continuing the deprecated tags post from earlier. It shows the list of tags that should not be used and the alternatives for them. Remember, this list isn't the complete thing, but it contains the most common tags that are deprecated.

<center>

As the tag name says, this was used to center items in html. It was one of the most useful tools as it would center just about anything you put inside of it's tags. For text, the alternative would be to put something like "<p align='center'>". This can also be done by css by using the "text-align:center;" code. Different browsers display the same code in weird ways so it is a hassle trying to find the correct usage that will work on each of the browsers you need it on.

<font>

Ages ago, people would use this code like <font color='someColor'> to give the text inside of it a certain color. Now that is accomplished with CSS. You would use the appropriate tag in the css style, and add the code "color:someColor;" to change it. The bonus to this, is that it affects everything on the page with that tag, and you no longer need to put the <font> tag in each section you needed it on.

<dir> and <menu>

The 'dir' and 'menu' tags were used to create unordered lists. These would be just bullets organized in one column to list items. The alternative is a shorter <ul>. You would add that to start a tag, then for each item in the tag, you use <li></li>. I'm not sure why there were 2 tags to accomplish the same thing, but now it's much easier to remember since this tag is for "U"nordered "L"ists.

Deprecated Tags (part 1)

From a past post, a couple comments led to me thinking this would be helpful, so here it is. This is a list of tags that were once used, but are now deprecated. Deprecated tags are tags that are no longer used and may someday be not functional. You could use them, as they do work, but it's best to revert to the new version which often offers more customization. I'm splitting this into 2 posts because of the amount of time it took to type up. I will finish the other part later when I find time. This list isn't complete, but it contains the most common tags that are deprecated.

<i>

This tag was used to give text a slanted look. "i" is short for italicize as most people know how it looks like. The alternative to this is now <em>. "em" stands for emphasized text. It is used the same way the 'i' tag has been used (and still used on applications like Myspace).

<u> and <strike>

These tags was used for decorating text with lines, and though underlining it still works, it is not recommended, even if you use the alternative. People generally refer to underlined text as links and could cause the person you are trying to get to read it some strain. The alternative to the 'u' tag is using Cascading Style Sheets. It takes a bit more time to type but offers more benefits. Using css, and the text "text-decoration:underline", one can achieve the same effects. The text-decoration can do four different techniques:

text-decoration:overline
text-decoration:line-through
text-decoration:underline
text-decoration:blink

<b>

Also known as the bold tag, this was used to .... well ... make text bold. The alternative is the <strong> tag, but this can also be achieved using css. Using css, it can do more than just make something bold. CSS allows you to specify a number for the boldness, 400 being normal, 700 being regular bold. Though using any of the numbers, and varieties, I have not noticed anything different so it could be browser specific.

PHP

Otherwise known as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is by far one of the most useful languages out there. There's practically no limit to the number of things it can do. For instance, using this blog deals with PHP. You would enter information like a blog title, and description and once you hit submit, the information is all stored in a database. The database is basically a giant table where you got different columns for things like "post number", "post title", "date of posting", "labels", etc. You could even create your own blog, quite simply from scratch. You would have to do this is you get the teacher Amir Khawaja for a GRC276 class.

The most important thing to learn, besides the codes to use, is how to use it. If you know how it will gather the information and display it, the job is half done. For the blog example, you would have these steps to understand:

1. Knowing how the information input gets stored in the database
2. Knowing how to read / access the information in the database
3. Knowing how to display the information that has been read / accessed

If you understand how something will do it's job, finding the code in a book, or online can easily be done. Then if you encounter an error, you know how it should work and can (sometimes) simply solve it.