Preparing Yourself for Tomorrow

If you've made your way through most of this book's hours, you already have one of the most important ingredients for future success in the new digital world: a solid working knowledge of HTML, XHTML, and CSS.

Chances are that your primary reason for learning HTML at this time was to create some web pages, but I hope this hour has convinced you that you'll be using XHTML for far more than that in the future. Here are some of the factors you should consider when planning and building your web site today so that it will also serve you well tomorrow:

• Whenever you run into something that you'd like to do on a web page, but can't with HTML as it stands today, include a comment in the page so that you can add that feature when it becomes possible in the future. The multimedia and interactive portions of your site are likely to need more revisions to keep up with current technology than will the text and graphics portions. When possible, keep the more cutting-edge elements of your site separate and take especially good care to document them well with the <!-- and -- > comment tags.

• Although high-bandwidth interactive media may be the wave of the future, be careful not to go overboard with it. Even people with fast Internet connections may not want to wait for a streaming video to start playing. Be sure to give your site visitors options when it comes viewing or listening to interactive media.

• Because style sheets give you complete control over the choice and measurements of type on your web pages, it is a good idea to study basic typography now if you aren't familiar with it. Understanding and working with things such as leading, kerning, em spaces , and drop caps has long been essential for producing truly professional-quality paper pages. It will soon be essential for producing outstanding web pages too.

• When you design your pages, don't always assume that everyone who sees them will be using a computer with a full- size monitor. Televisions, mobile phones, game consoles, and many other devices might have access to them as well. Some of these devices have very low-resolution screens (with 200x200 pixels or even less on some phones). Although it's difficult to design a web page to look good at that resolution, you'll reach the widest possible audience if you do.

  By the Way It's not wrong if you decided not to worry about trying to design your pages for devices with very small screens. In fact, it's usually not realistic to design a single page that can look good at both 200x200 and 1280x1024 resolutions . However, you may consider offering an alternative version of your pages that can be viewed on devices with small screens. A bit later in the hour you'll learn about XHTML Mobile, which offers exactly that option.

  
  

• Several relatively new standards have been issued by the World Wide Web Consortium that will increasingly impact the Web as time goes by. These include the following:

  XHTML Mobile

  Portable Network Graphics (PNG)

  Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

  Synchronized Multimedia Interface Language (SMIL)

  Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

  Mathematics Markup Language (MathML)

  eXtensible Style Sheet Language (XSL)

  On the privacy and security front, new standards include these:

  Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS)

  Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P)

  Digital Signature standar d (Dsig)

  Because these advances are likely to both expand the potential capabilities of your web site and change some of the methods you currently use to build web pages, you should visit the w3.org site and take the time to learn a little about each of them.