Hi Violet,
Welcome to the Wonderful World of the WorldWide Web! You are now dealing
with one of the most troublesome aspects of developing HTML documents, and
that is the fact that HTML documents are viewed on a whole heck of a lot of
computers, running a bunch of different operating systems, with different
monitor sizes, screen resolution settings, and color resolution settings,
and of course, different brands of browsers. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention:
Even on the same computer you can size the browser window to different
sizes.
What can you do about it? Well, it all depends on how hard you are willing
to work. It's a big learning curve, because there are many ways to deal with
this shifty situation, and the more of them you are familiar with, the
better off you'll be. I, and I'm sure some others here, can give you a few
clues and ideas, but you'll have to do most of the leg work for yourself.
And don't forget, you can always come back to this newsgroup and find
helpful people to get you over the individual humps.
Basically, there are a few rules of thumb to live by. As far as color is
concerned, you might want to avoid using images that contain more than 256
colors in them. Also, you may want to stick with web-safe (256-color
pallette) colors for your HTML elements, such as font colors, table colors,
etc. This will ensure that the colors look the same on all computers.
As far as fonts are concerned, stick to the major fonts that are available
on most systems. Times New Roman is the default font of almost all browsers.
Arial or Helvetica is also safe to use for san-serif fonts. And Courier is
also universally supported. Anything other than that, and you're taking a
chance. There are ways of specifying alternate fonts and a few other tricks,
but I don't want to overload you right now. We still haven't talked about
layout!
As far as layout is concerned, avoid using styles for positioning (sometimes
referred to as "absolute positioning"). This method places and sizes items
using fixed pixel positions relative to either the browser window, or to
other elements in the page. It can be useful in certain situations, but
there are browsers out there that don't support it, and you might be mighty
disappointed with where things end up on those browsers. It is better to use
tables for layout if you want your page to look good everywhere. You can
create "invisible" tables, which have a 0 border, cellspacing and
cellpadding, and use the cells in the tables to position your HTML elements.
With tables, you can use percentages or fixed pixel dimensions to position
and size your HTML elements and table elements. As to which to go with,
that's a tough one to answer. It really depends on your requirements. for a
beginner, I would probably recommend using fixed pixel sizes and dimensions
for your layout tables. Make the outer table 800X600 pixels (this is the
most popular screen resolution at this time). or a little smaller (to allow
for the browser window). Then you can set the size of the table cells to the
fixed sizes that are appropriate for their content. In FrontPage, you can
drag the borders of the cells to size them easily.
There's a good bit more I could talk about, but that should cover the
majors, and give you enough to chew on for now. And as I said, you'll
probably see a few other suggestions in response to your query, so check
back.
Again, don't be discouraged; you'll get the hang of it soon enough. And
we'll be here whenever you need us.
--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
..Net Developer
http://www.takempis.com
Big Things are made up of
Lots of Little Things.
