I am interested in learning how to build a website. I would like to learn HTML and build it from scratch rather than using a template. If anyone has any online classes they found helpful or other websites/programs please post. I have a mac and am not sure if that matters.

You might not want to use a template you got from somebody else, but you certainly want to create your own template, so that you can avoid editing every single page when something in the footer changes.
I am using a combination of dreamweaver and a text editor (I use vi in a terminal, if you are terminalphobic and don't want to learn vi (people say it's not easy, but I have been using it for 20 years), you can use the notepad for that.

The dreamweaver part I use mostly for entering contents and looking how it actually looks like. There are also free programs for that, but their name momentarily escapes me. With dreamweaver, you can edit the html in one half of the screen, and the wyswyg stuff in the other part (split screen mode).

The text editor I use to edit mostly the css, because I really don't like the way dreamweaver changes the css when I go thought their pointy-clicky interface.

What you will want to learn in order to create a well-written page is not just html but also css.
I like the html/xhtml/css visual quickstart guide from Elizabeth Castro, but I haven't looked at the current one (css is ever changing, and the Castro book I own is a few years older).

Otherwise, I am using google a lot to figure out specific things.

For my first html/css pages, I just "stole" a stylesheet from a friend who is a web-designer, and used it as a starting point.

If you want to see a page that I recently wrote, send me an email. It is a little complex, but the elements are there, and the css, while not 100% professional, is well organized in the file.

Edited to add: I just remembered the program I thought of: it's called "coda", for mac, 14 days trial, then $99. Much more affordable than the adobe programs.

That by template you are thinking iweb?

Personally, I would recommend you have a look at what you can achieve with that. For an initial website, you can do a lot with it.

To learn to create and edit websites from scratch? To my mind, something best left to the experts if you want something that looks professional, not to mention, that works.

If you are serious about learning & using HTML - I would say, you are a braver person than me...

First step tho, would be finding a dummies book (or similar) and start reading up on the basics....Then, think if you really want to go that way!

Stu the crazy bass from down under


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Polar bears for Obama!!

Video learning. They offer some lessons for free to try them out and aren't too expensive.

Shrill

I had never programmed anything except shell script, but I did have fairly extensive background in use of NROFF and TROFF (typesetting markup languages used on Unix systems), and had read the SGML specification a while back, so I had a pretty good idea what markup languages are all about.


Here are the resources I found most helpful:

http://htmlhelp.com/ - Web Design Group's resources for self-teaching HTML. I found these a lot more helpful than any book I looked at.

http://www.i18nguy.com/markup/ncrs.html - This will introduce you to the concept of "character codes" and "character entity references".

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html - This explains the concepts of "character codes" and "character entity references" extremely thoroughly. These are important to anyone who wishes to venture outside the standard ASCII character set, e.g., to use foreign language characters and diacriticals.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/ - This is the actual W3C HTML 4.01 specification. Sometimes it pays to simply go to the source, so to speak, to find out what various tags are intended to do, and how to use them.

http://validator.w3.org/ - This is an invaluable resource for checking that what you've coded is correct, standard-compliant HTML

Once you get going with HTML, you may find the following helpful:

http://www.kanzaki.com/docs/colortable-t.html - This is a "quick colour table" - like a Pantone guide - that tells you the numeric codes to use in HTML to indicate colours on Web pages.

http://www.altheim.com/specs/charents.html - This is a reference I find invaluable - it links you to the various "character entity reference sets" of tags for different foreign language characters and diacriticals, as defined in various ISO standards.

http://www.music-notation.info/Musixmldtd/ISOlat2.pen.html - This is a simple table of those HTML character entity references for the tags you'll need for Romance and Germanic characters and diacriticals. It doesn't help with Slavic or non-European languages that use the Latin alphabet.

http://webdesign.about.com/od/localization/l/blhtmlcodes-ru.htm - This is a page that tells you all the HTML codes for Russian Cyrillic characters. It's the About.com page, and provides links to a lot of other HTML authoring resources that I've never bothered to check out. They might be good.

http://www.shrinkpictures.com/ - Makes life easier for the nearly-brain-dead who can't figure out how to use the "width=" and "height=" attributes of the HTML IMG tag to change the size at which graphic images are displayed on their Web pages, and who don't want to pay $80 for Adobe PhotoShop Elements (which does pretty much any non-professional photographer or graphic artist will need done to digital images).

http://validator.w3.org/checklink - This will check that any URLs you've included in your HTML file are valid, and if they're not will suggest what to do about them. You need to host the HTML file somewhere on the Web to use the tool - i.e., upload it as a Web page. After you get the report from the validator, you can go back into the HTML and correct or delete any "broken links". I generally Google the site I thought the broken URL would send me to, to find out if there's a new URL. The Validator will only tell you about new URLs if the owner of the Webpage has posted a "redirect" page. (Not many do.)

Hope these things help.

P.S. Next challenge-to-self (in my copious spare time): learn XHTML; learn how to use cascading style sheets.

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Karen Mercedes - contralto
singwiththespirit [at] yahoo [dot] com
http://artfuljesus.0catch.com/karenmercedes.html