What this site is for
= Index DOT Html by Brian Wilson [bloo@blooberry.com] =

Main Index | Top Of Tree | Tag Index | Tag History
Who This Site Is Aimed At
While some of the external links provided here are good beginner's entry points to learning HTML, the contents of this site are directed generally toward the more advanced author. It should be fairly easy to come up to speed quickly on the basics of HTML though.

This site is meant to be a repository and reference for technical information about HTML tags and the popular browsers that support them. This reference is not meant to replace any of the official references put forth by the W3 or its member companies, it is rather meant to collect all of the far-flung resources into a single, coherent whole (hopefully.)

Why A Web Site?
The Internet in general, and the Web/HTML in particular, are fast moving targets which change quickly. My goal is to keep up with that rapid pace of change, only in its regard to HTML. Compiling this reference and keeping it up to date in most ANY other format would be near impossible. Wish me luck... All you readers out there can help me achieve this.

What Is Covered
I have tried to gather and cohesively organize all known information about the specifics of the HyperText Markup Language as of the time of writing.
  • Comprehensive table of all HTML tags currently supported by Internet Explorer, Mosaic and Netscape.
    This list breaks the tags AND attributes down by first letter and details the very first version of each browser where support began. This list also details support within the HTML 2.0, 3.0 and 3.2 specifications.
  • Brief overviews of HTML 2.0, 3.0, and 3.2 and Cougar
  • Summary of Browser releases important to the support of HTML.
    These pages detail the platforms that the browsers run on, as well as version release dates.
  • Side by side comparison of Internet Explorer, Mosaic, and Netscape release dates.
  • Tree structure detailing all HTML tags in use today by the major browsers.
    This tree organization loosely groups the tags by location in an actual HTML document.
  • Tag grouping overview.
    This part of the tree structure consists of pages giving an introduction to each tag section topic. Also included in these pages are links to related sites on the HTML topic.
  • Alphabetic tag index to all currently used HTML tags
  • Tag pages for every HTML tag.
    This is THE biggest portion of the site. It lists everything you might want to know about the HTML tags in common use. I decided to cover all HTML 2.0 and 3.2 (Wilbur) tags, browser created extensions, and those HTML 3.0 tags in general use. Tags from HTML 3.0 that are not in general use today (which is a large portion of the draft) will be of little interest to authors unless they become supported at some future date. (I hope. If I left anything out, please tell me.)
    In the page for each tag, you will find:
       - Browser support for each tag
       - A brief tag description
       - All known attributes for each tag including allowed attribute values
       - Tag examples
       - Parent/content models
       - Tips and tricks when using the tag
       - Known peculiarities in the implementation of the tag in the popular browsers.
  • Cascading Style Sheet reference.
    I never intended this section to be as big as it has become. The real life specification for style sheets is 60-ish pages, and while mine is much smaller, it is still not a trivial thing. The area of Style Sheets IS a complex topic, and one that requires a lot of explanation. I try to explain things a bit more than I do elsewhere in the site.
Minimalist Design Strategy
The site contains very few images [actually only 5 - 1 logo, 1 site map, and 3 graphical 'tree' elements.] Only HTML elements are used to achieve the layout appearance elsewhere (In part to reduce download size and time, but also because they did not seem necessary here.) The color scheme was chosen by me to give maximum readability. I prefer dark, passive backgrounds to bright, active ones to reduce eyestrain in extended reading on a computer (and this site is large enough to warrant extended reading) but I realize others might not find the scheme I have chosen to be as readable. =)

I curse the day Netscape chose to go from a 12 point default basefont that all other browsers use(d) to 10 point in version 2.0 which warranted a global Bold effect on all text. (It makes the normal size font very weak and hard to read even on high contrast backgrounds - but that is another story.) The site looks fairly good on all browsers I have demo'ed it on and I have tried to reduce the table complexity as much as possible (no nested tables - Mosaic users will really appreciate this =) ) but I have not yet gone to great lengths to ensure proper degradation on less capable browsers. That will take some time a bit later on when the content is more established. For those readers, please bear with me - I am doing this in my spare time and the site is LARGE.

Boring Copyright Stuff...