Finding more help
on HTML and
other web related topics

Modern web site design often involves a wider range of skills than is described in this introductory HTML guide. Many of the latest sites feature some clever tricks, performed using Java applets, JavaScript code, CGI scripting, and dynamic HTML documents. Clearly, learning any of these is a major undertaking, and you'd need to read a book or two to do it properly. But in creating the vast majority of pages, you won't need more than what's already in this guide. To consolidate your knowledge, have a look at the source code of any page of this guide, which was created using most of the techniques described within it, but nothing more!

If you do feel ready to look at some more advanced topics, which will give your pages extra functionality and style, then below is a carefully chosen selection of the very best web sites to help you. Click on any of the logos to go the sites:

	W3C is the international standards organisation which controls the web. It produces formal specifications on HTML, CSS, and other languages, as well as acting as an advocacy group for standardisation.
	Here is the W3C's formal HTML 4.0 specification. It's a fairly long a dry document, and is certainly not intended to be a guide per se, but it does offer a complete list of all the elements officially permitted, and their attributes. Use this for reference, when you need to be absolutely precise with your markup.
	Yahoo! has a whole tree of information on everything to do with HTML, so use this as a launchpad to find out more about anything you could think of.
	WDVL is a brilliant resource site for everything to do with web development, and offers far more than just the technicalities of coding in HTML. There's plenty of information on style, design tips, and anything else you could imagine, as well as the more verbose stuff.
	WebReference, another excellent and popular web resources site, has produced a well-researched guide to HTML 4.0 support discrepancies in MSIE and Netscape. This is highly useful if you're trying to produce pages which work well in both browsers, though in a way, it can be discouraging to see the extra complexity induced by their lack of standards support!
	Builder.com has produced this superb interactive guide to cascading style sheets, with a cool reference table of all the properties. This is certainly a great way of learning CSS, beyond what you may have already discovered from this guide.
	Buried deep within the Microsoft site is a gallery of astonishing examples, showing you the true power of style sheets in action. Have a quick browse through these, and you'll begin to get an idea of just how far you can go without images or tables.
	JavaScript is an interpreted programming language that allows you to massively enhance web pages. You can generate dynamic content, automate all sorts of things, and produce slick visual effects. Whilst learning it formally is quite an undertaking, this site has tons of great scripts which you can download and use freely in your pages - without having to know the language itself! Adapting these scripts is fairly simple, and JavaScript will look familiar if you've done any sort of C programming before.
	O'Reilly publishes an excellent range of computing books, including the superb Definitive Guide HTML book, and even offers online ordering.
	Learning the principles of good design is just as important as learning how to produce HTML. We hunted down this simple but well-written page, explaining all the pitfalls of creating web pages, and how you can avoid them. It will help you produce clear, logical and smart pages which work in different browsers on different platforms, and keep your viewers interested.
	XML is one of the biggest buzzwords of the moment. It's the exciting new eXtensible Markup Language, which looks set to become of the biggest worldwide standards for storing all types of data. It will revolutionise the web, particularly in the field of e-commerce, and W3C's 10-point guide gives you an overview of what XML is about.
	WDVL has written a good, straightforward introduction to XHTML, which is set to replace HTML 4.0 with a new formulation based on XML semantics. This is likely to be the future for web pages, so it's worth having a read.

If you do feel like cheating, you can use an authoring tool to create HTML for you, via a desktop publishing interface. Some applications, like Netscape Communicator, have such tools built in, while there are many more which are standalone packages. But they are universally notorious for generating dodgy, messy and non-compliant code, so you are strongly advised to ignore them. Furthermore, to create anything beyond the most basic pages, there is undeniably no substitute for knowing HTML properly, so authoring tools will not be discussed further here.

If you would rather read a good old fashioned paper document, there are many books available on the subject of HTML, which should teach you just as much as the online material. Any good bookshop these days will stock a multitude of such books. The disadvantage of books is that they go out of date phenomenally quickly, whereas online sources should get regularly updated. Good luck!