Re: Many stupid basic questions

I tried to keep this brief....:)

----- Original Message -----
From: IceWolf <icewolf(at)tampabay.rr.com>

1) What g'zactly is CSS and how do you use it with respect to web sites?

-- Cascading Styles Sheets are a W3C-based Recommendation.  The basic idea
is to seperate structure and presentation of a document.  Style sheets
handle presentation issues, such as font sizesand colors, positioning of
elements on the page, etc.

2) What is CGI?

-- Common Gateway Interface is a protocol that governs certain forms of
communication between your computer and the server.  Most commony known for
its contribution to interactivity by setting standards that allow
information to be passed from browser to server, as with form submissions.

3) What are META tags?

-- HTML tags in the HEAD of a document that provide a place to supply
information about the docuemtn to humans and software alike.

4) How do you use keywords?

-- Place a comma-delimited string of them in the keywords meta tag to start
with.  Essentially, they are intended to work in conjunction with indexing
software in order to link your site as search results for search terms that
apply to your site.  Since you may not be able to use every word that
applies to your site in the body of the text, this gives you a place to
include words/phrases that apply.

5) How do you do forms?

-- You may want a class...:).  Essentially, there's two sides to the
question:

* The HTML side.  Forms are made just like any other HTML structure: by
using properly nested tagsets.  A simple example might be:

<.form method="post" action="http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/myScript.cgi">
 Email:&nbsp;<.input type="text" name="email" />
 <.input type="submit" value="Press Here" />
<./form>

That (without the dots) would give you a form with a box for email, and a
button to press to submit the email.  The form, when submitted, would call a
CGI script named myScript.cgi for help processing.

* The CGI side.  Once submitted, the information from the form has to be
parsed, validated and used for something.  This is usually done by a script
on the server written in a scripting or programming language.  Common
Gateway Interface ensures that the form can communicate with the script.

D

HTML: hwg-basics mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA