Documents: Document Publishing: WWW

The World Wide Web has reached a high level of maturity, and is also a great source of controvercy. Since it's start, somewhere around 1994, we've seen raging battles about HTML standards, protocol standards, and it's not yet over.

The only thing that can be said for sure is that the web isn't a technical playground for a few geeks and some industries that want to use it as yet another media for commercials. The uses seem to be endless and growing.

An old collection of WWW resources on the net

• SGML:
  
  • HTML standards is a SGML application. Therefore, an understanding of SGML could prove usefull.
• Standardisation:
  
  • The WWW Consortium. You can check the Activity page as well.
• Proposals:
  
  • A way to represent math on your WWW page. [probably obsolete, see the W3C Math Proposal]
• Search robots and how to deal with them:
  
  • Robot Exclusion Standard Revisited.
• HTML stuff:
  
  • Boutell's WWW information, including a FAQ.
  • Make your comments legal.
  • A HTML tutorial.
  • The HTML Writers Guild
  • W3C's HTML Validation Service. This is a great resource to use when you want to make sure your pages are valid HTML.
  • Imagiware also has a powerful checker, called Doctor HTML.
  • There's another good checker (a lot more graphics... *ahem*) called the web site garage.
  • The Web Developer's Virtual Library
  • The HTML Terrorist's Handbook (or, Composing Evil HTML).
• CGI stuff:
  
  • FastCGI, another way to build and run CGI programs.
  • Matt's Scrip Archive.
• JavaScript stuff:
  
  • JavaScript frame FAQ.
• Books:
  
  • The Webmaster's Handbook.
• Netscapeisms:
  
  • An Exploration of Dynamic Documents (server-push, client-pull...).
  • More info on cookies.
• Unsorted:
  
  • All Things Web.
  • Learn the web.

Image-specific pages

• Information about GIF:
  
  • GIF animation.
  • Gif89a FAQ
• Pages with free images and icons:
  
  • Andy's Art, lots of free images and buttons.
  • A page with free images you can fetch.
  • The MicroMovie MiniMultiPlex gallery of public domain images available for download and use.
  • A Background Images menu page. Contains a large bunch.
  • At Pixelsight, you can make your own banners and images, and then download them.
  • Dr. Ozone
  • netCREATORS Icon Page
  • Andy Polyakov's icons for NCSA httpd and Apache.

Useful free or shareware programs

• Povray, a free raytracing program.
• Moray, a modeller that works with Povray.
• The General Image Manipulation Program. It's a program that is said to be inspired by Adobe Photoshop. It's currently only available on Unix computers.
• GIF and other formats, programs.

Really ugly HTML pages (in my opinion)

• Study Mirsky's Worst of the Web.
• Web Pages That Suck.
  This is actually a very good place to learn good design. There are a few examples of well-designed pages (although I have no idea how those look with Lynx, so there may be a difference in opinion...).

Stupid tricks and other funny things

• Sign the Netscape Engineering Sign.
• A PostScript converter