]> Beginners | Web Developer Reference Blog

Give your website an icon

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

Personalise your users experience with the use of a favicon.ico file. Web browsers check to see if you site has a Favourites Icon which allows a user to easily identify your website in their favourites list. Some browsers; most popularly Chrome, FireFox, and IE 7+; show the icon in the tabs for easy identification.

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PHP Objects, The Basics

Friday, February 26th, 2010

I have come across classes very often and use classes distributed on phpclasses.org such as phpMailer, an excellent class for sending emails using PHP. A class allows programmers to separate code from the main systems while being able to access and define variables for access outside the class, inside the class or just within one function in the class.

In this article I will discuss the general structure of a simple class and usage of a simple “HELLO” class as an example.

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HTML Standards

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

The fundamental reason for HTML standards compliance is to ensure that you use only those elements and structures that are likely to be understood by the widest range of user agents.

It’s like English – if I were to speak East Anglian most other English speakers would not understand everything I say.
Similarly, if you use proprietary dialects of HTML, some user agents won’t understand everything you write.

There is however, a standard for HTML which the browser makers say they support, and validation points out the potential problems in your HTML source. By adhering to the standards you maximise the accessibility of your work to the widest range of user agents, and therefore, users.

Why should I comply with web standards?

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Complying with web standards can give your web pages greater visibility in web searches. The structural information present in compliant documents makes it easy for search engines to access and evaluate the information in those documents, and they get indexed more accurately.

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