HTML Help Page
Help with creating, publicizing, searching for and evaluating web pages;
and including help finding people, their e-mail addresses, etc.
This page will show links to sites which provide help to new Internet users,
and new Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) users in creating pages
(including both theory and preferred styles), guidelines for good HTML
practices, publicizing web pages (which implies a knowledge of the
search engines and how they work), searching the web generally for
interesting sites [and e- mail addresses], and applying critical evaluation
of Internet resources. The page has been augmented to also provide searching
for people, lost friends, snail-mail addresses, telephone and fax numbers
(including yellow and blue pages and toll-free numbers).
See also a page for HELP using Mosaic
or Netscape the first few times to search the web. Give your new users
this link and save yourself a lot of very elementary questions.
See also a page for Help with E-mail
and Mailing Lists for new Internet E-mail Users. Sections include:
What is E-mail? Line-length; attachments; signature files; costs, privacy;
copying messages and fragments; mailing lists caution; finding and subscribing
to mailing lists. Sections also deal with Auto-Responders, Mail Robots,
Mirrors. E-mail Zines (Magazines), sending FAXes via E-mail, access to
FTP, Archie, Gopher, Veronica, Usenet, WAIS, Finger, Whois, and even the
World-Wide Web (all via e-mail).
Table
of Contents for this Page:
_______________________________________
- Help for those new to the Internet:
-
An excellent (though longer) Introduction
to the Internet (98 Kb) is contained in the Appeals Court decision
overturning the CDA on June 12th, 1996.
Return
to Table of Contents for this page. Go
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_____________________________________________
- Help in Creating Web Pages:
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A good place to start everything is with the Beginner's
Guide to HTML. There are also references at this site to guides for
good HTML practice, etc., that are worth the read.
.
-
Eric Tilton's page "Composing
Good HTML," particularly its section "Document Style Considerations"
provides some interesting insights about the use of HTML to provide a device-independent
way of describing information. Tilton emphasizes the importance of marking
up a document so that your information is labeled as what it is instead
of as how it should be displayed. Paradoxically, the page does not have
a table of contents (!).
.
-
Our "Web Page Style Standards, Guidelines and
Suggestions" page describes something of writing for the Information
Age, and may be helpful for those preparing web pages for the first time,
especially when done in behalf of a government agency, or other public
information source.
.
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Another extensive site for web developers and authors is Andrew King's
Webreference
site, including news, articles, services and more.
.
-
The Berkley Digital
Library SunSITE posts a breezy two pager: "Guidelines for Web Document
Style & Design" which will be a very helpful checklist for web page
creation once you have done a few pages.
.
-
The World-Wide Web home page (9 Kb) provides
an index to Specifications and Development Areas for HTML, a general section
on web software and other interesting stops.
.
-
Jakob Nielsen has some terse
advice for writing for the Web: "Be
Succinct! (Writing for the Web)." He adds other insights about nested
headings, and writing in "coherent chunks," too. [See also: Alertbox
(Jakob's bi-weekly column on Web usability)].
.
-
Jakob Nielsen also has some very
good advice about Cascading Style Sheets. His paper "Effective
Use of Style Sheets" describes a few dos and don'ts and provides links
to related resources. [See also: Alertbox
(Jakob's bi-weekly column on Web usability)].
.
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WebReference.Com offers an index
of several dozen guides and guidelines on authoring.
.
-
The Yahoo
Best of the Web in Web Design and Development contains lists of web
sites in various categories which several thousand web users thought were
the best they had encountered. There are some interesting sites that are
probably good examples to follow; and the best navigational-aid sites might
help directly if you are having trouble in your searches.
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_____________________________________________
- Help in Publicizing Web Pages:
As you contemplate publicizing your web pages, be aware that there are
always people who will use your web pages for other than the purposes you
intend. When I was first doing this, I made the mistake of providing a
new page's URL to a service that said: "submit your page to dozens and
dozens of search engines HERE." I didn't see any evidence that the page
was subsequently submitted to even a few search engines; but I did notice
that I started to receive dozens and dozens of spam e-mail messages right
away. Apparently, the URL had been used to harvest the feedback e-mail
addresses and sell them to spammers. I have not found that problem with
sending my URLs to the reputable search engines (see searching,
below).
-
The Net-Happenings Moderator has established a Frequently-Asked
Questions web page with some suggestions about how to announce your
web page.
.
-
Josh's Sanctum in Australia
lists sites submitted recently, and archives of previously-submitted sites.
It is a bit frivolous, but may still provide some interesting insights.
.
-
Most search engines have one-page-at- a-time submission forms for new web
pages.
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_____________________________________________
- Help in Searching for Web Pages:
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The Internet Public Library at the University of Michigan is a good first
stop in Internet searching. Their Web
Searching page distinguishes between search engines and catalogs, describes
their view of the best three of each, and provides links to other search
facilities too.
.
-
Another Searching Guide is Jack Solock's "Searching
the Internet - Parts I & II" (43 Kb). He provides searching guidance,
and links to the search forms and the searching help pages for half a dozen
of the most popular search engines. He also provides discussion of search
catalogs and search directories; subject catalogs, annotated directories,
and subject guides. This site is a big help for people new to web searching.
.
-
The Lycos search engine is fast and
powerful, and contains a large data base
.
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HotWired Ventures' HotBot search engine
[cookies (cookie caution)]
claims to search millions of web pages, as well as Usenet News and Mailing
Lists.
.
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The InfoSeek Net Search [cookies
(cookie caution)] has
a large data base and tips on searching techniques.
.
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EINet Galaxy (14 Kb +
17 Kb image) provides a very complete directory of Internet resources.
.
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The Yahoo site also provides a very
complete directory to many web sites.
.
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The Web Crawler, operated by America
Online, Inc., searches a large data base, is quick, and I find it returns
useful results on most searches.
.
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The Starting Point contains links to
a large variety of web sites, and would like to become the best place for
you to start exploring the network.
.
-
The Dilbert Zone runs The
Inquirer with searches grouped by what each search engine is good at.
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_____________________________________________
- Help in Critical Evaluation of Internet Resources.
-
Alastair Smith, under the
auspices of the World- Wide Web Virtual Library posts a page "Evaluation
of Information Sources," which is a part of the Information Quality
WWW Virtual Library. It contains extensive links to evaluation criteria
pages, etc.
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_____________________________________________
- Help in Searching for E-mail Addresses:
... and Telephone Numbers and Snail-mail Addresses,
... and People, and Lost Friends, etc.
-
InfoSpace is claiming to be
the "most comprehensive " place to search out names, telephone numbers
and snail-mail addresses. To locate phone numbers and addresses of people
in Canada, try People
Finder [cookies (cookie
caution)].
.
-
Telephone Directories on the
Web [cookies (cookie
caution)] provides a comprehensive list of countries for which telephone
and other directories may be searched.
.
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MIT's "Usenet Addresses"
site allows you to search a database of e-mail addresses and names which
have been culled from usenet traffic in the past. It seems fairly quick
and complete.
.
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David Lamb's How
to Find People's E-mail Addresses page at Queen's University Computing
and Information Science Department in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
.
-
Yahoo has inaugurated a "People
Search" [cookies (cookie
caution)] web site where you can search for snail-mail addresses and
telephone numbers by name. Conversely, if you have a telephone number,
you can search for the name of the person who has that number. The information
is complied from white pages information and other publicly-available information
sources through Database America. So far as I can tell, the names, addresses
and phone numbers are presently only in the U.S.
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_____________________________________________
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Title: HTML; Hypertext Markup Language; HTML Theory and Practice;
Help; Getting Started with Creating your own Web pages; Searching the Web;
Publishing on the Web; Publicizing your web site; Searching for E-mail
addresses; Critical Evaluation of Internet Resources; Searching for snail-mail
addresses, telephone and fax numbers.
Contact for further information about this page: Chet Meek.
Voice: 780+433-6577; E-mail:
cmeek@ocii.com
The primary URL for this page is at: http://www.GoChet.ca/h_html.htm
Page last updated: 4 April 2008 (N4.8). Page created:
20 July 1995.
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