Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
Sitepoint releases HTML reference as a beta
Category: Announcements
, Browsers, Microformat
While this is not strictly Ajax or JavaScript related, it is noteworthy to point out that Sitepoint just released a HTML reference that is quite handy to have around if you wonder if what you are building is really HTML or just tagsoup.
Good HTML references are really hard to come by, either they are just listings, like W3schools.com or terribly outdated. Sitepoint have done quite a good job in listing all the HTML elements and categorizing them into different use cases. There is also a list of deprecated elements and attributes to avoid (which could be considered dangerous to still bring up as some of them are too handy to simply add to solve an issue) and a Microformats primer.
We know for a fact that other portals/article sites are working on similar projects and consider it a really good way of flushing old and outdated tutorials on things as simple but important as markup out of the search engine result pages.
The reference also gives a legend of browser support, something that so so far was only available on the German SelfHTML reference.
It’s handy, I’ll admit, but it isn’t terribly needed. There aren’t so many tags that you can’t just scroll through W3Schools. Unless you are new to HTML and need to know what tags do what, you can just use the W3S reference. But I’m not going to complain, because it never hurts to have a more organized version. =)
To a beginner, the most useful part of W3schools is the interactive examples. The sitepoint reference seems thorough, but some places where you can see it in action and play with it is the most useful way to learn. Same goes for the CSS reference.
My personal favorite is http://www.devguru.com although I do like sitepoints “restful” URL structure.
ditto on http://www.devguru.com, even though it is getting outdated these days i can not count the number of times i have looked to it for a quick answer on JavaScript, XHTML (HTML), CSS, or XSLT. no other site i have seen presents the information in such a clear and to the point way.
p.s. any idea who runs that site? it has been around forever and i have never heard anything about them. i am curious if they are still active and if it will ever be updated.
Goodman’s Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference - no desk should be without it.