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Cameron's HTML Information Stuff

It pains me when I see badly written HTML pages. Especially when they are from large companies or cool pages that could use a little help.

So when this happened one to many times. I wrote this page. It is in an order of importance (according to me!).

• Put width= and height= tags on your images. This might sound like a pain but it dramatically increases the appearance of a page on your browser. There is nothing more annoying that having the page loaded already except for some stupid image at the top, which makes the browser wait for the image. If you hold the right button over an image in netscape and select "Open this Image", the title will contain the image dimensions.
• DON'T use those stupid scrolling things in the status window. Especially if you are a large corporation. They annoy too many people for a stupid effect. Use a ticker tape applet instead. Note. That it is possible to use the scrolling bar correctly, but I haven't seen it done yet.

• Put alt= tags on your images. This for two reasons. Many people like to use lynx (a command line browser) as a fast way to retrieve information. When they don't want all the fancy formatting etc etc.. Next is for people who don't "Auto Load" images. This is useful for people with low-bandwidth lines. The other reason is, if the image fails to load and for browsers that will put a little text description of the image before it loads. All of these things enhance the user experience at your site.
• If you decide to use a background image, also set BGCOLOR. The reason for this is that if say you have a dark background and light text, and the background doesn't load (or takes a while) the text is unreadable. It is best to choose a color that is the average of the background image.
• One (minor) point is that some people have black and white displays, in such a case if you choose a colour scheme with low contrast, both the background and foreground will have the same colour.
• Place contact information at the bottom of all pages. For medium sized sites it is quite difficult to get feedback from users. This can be extremely useful.
• For large companies I believe it is important to make your applets work through a firewall. More info to come ... (especially sites like java.sun.com and www.gamelan.com)
• Make the init method of you applets finish quickly. This will stop the browser from appearing like it is hung.