I am new to Homesite, and serious HTML authoring. I've plenty of content, really, in the form of essays and stories. However I'd like to present them in an organized and stylish fashion. This requires that I gain some familiarity with Homesite.
There is another reason, and that is that I'd like to explore the limits of markup. That is, what can be accomplished with the simplest tags?
I anticipate that there will be sections on other technologies as I go along, such as CSS, and certain 'DHTML' components like Javascript.
This page would be filled with a large array of useful tips for the homesite user, including screen shots, and include feedback mechanisms for constant improvement. Information within the project should be easy to find and well linked both internal and external sources.
An interface to the page that allows questions to be posed and not answered immediately would be very useful. However, this would be more along the line of an application with HTML as its output, rather than pure HTML. Nothing wrong with that but its important to keep the distinction clear.
I anticipate spending about 24 hours total on this project
Homesite's editor doesn't render tags. This has several repercussions:
These are things that are familiar to me as a coder, but I can see how HTML authors with a non-technical background would not enjoy this, and might feel more comfortable with visual renderings. Allaire provides a set of tools andguidelinee documentation to help in the task of writing readable/maintainable HTML. See Best Practices for Coding HTML and CFML. Interestingly, I could not create a symbolic link to that file, I had to copy it to my manual inclusive project folder. We'll look over it later.
If you move around the web, you find a few competing aesthetics. They can be characterized along two different axis:
Lets make a table and populate it with some examples of what I mean:
| Maybe a corner graphic here? | Little Information | Much Information |
|---|---|---|
| Simple Tech |
Google Results SlashDotIt seems that the real hacker sites all fall into this category. |
|
| Complex Tech | Lots of big tech companies fall into this category. |
MSNThis is complex because of ActiveX Sun's Java site This was a tough one to categorize, because Sun's site is pretty minimal, actually. |
Complexity of technology needs a bit more explanation. By this I mean bells and whistles visible on the client side. This means ActiveX, Java, Javascript, Flash, RealAudio, etc. I would not consider HTML Frames or forms to be complex. Server side technology like ASP, JSP, PHP and CGI are not complex for a single page interface. More complex server environments also do not count.
Information density might also be worth talking about. There is raw information density, and useful information density, which is very subjective and relative to the task at hand. I am speaking of the raw kind.
It's important to note that I am talking about individual pages rather than whole sites. The distinction is important, since sites like Apache Web Server are actually full of information, even if the opening page is not.
Well it seems that I have to speed up my resume building activities.
Ahh...well that wasn't so bad. Here it is: resume. The way I did it was to simply export from Word to HTML and then do a bit of editing in homesite. Interestingly, the HTML output from Word was unable to be parsed. It seems to use some XML constructs that Homesite doesn't like. Interesting, neh?
Well, it becomes more and more pressing that I sell some of my items, especially the bulky ones. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. An auction 'ad' is largely static. How should it be laid out?
Amazon.com is a very successful online retailer, so we'll start here. Besides, I always like their product layouts.
In words, the ad is surrounded by other material, but the nice photo is what gets your attention. They seem to use this and put the essential information right on the edge of the nice photo:
Related items and editorials follow.
It is safe to assume that Amazon has spent a lot of money on this design. So lets see if we can't copy it...