Play Nice with HTML

It was never my goal to be the next Web wiz kid. I still like print and paper and ink. But anymore, even dedicated print designers have to know a little basic HTML. I know a lot of CMSs claim that you can post to the Web (or produce a “professional” looking email announcement) without knowing any coding, but in reality that just doesn’t work. If you are working in a CMS, you almost always have to have some limited HTML skills to get the results that you want, or, at the very least, results that are okay enough.

I don’t code in HTML that often, so when I do I am usually a bit rusty. And I quite often have to look up any tags that are more complicated than <strong> or <em> (AKA bold and italic). To make life easier, I have a handy list of the HTML codes for special characters. A friend gave me the list when she turned over to me a project posting articles for an online medical journal, and I use it frequently. (It was from about.com which no longer exists—but I am sure other lists are out there.) Anything more complicated (like how do I define a <p> tag or set up a bulleted list?), I can usually figure out after a quick Google search (because Google really is the best).

And, I try to keep up with basic coding dos and don’ts. Sloppy code may look fine on your computer, but who knows how it will look in another browser, email program, or computer platform. This article from Line25 Web Design Blog on coding of special characters contains some basic tips on how to style your content so that it looks typeset not typed. And while you are there, check out the two companion articles (one on HTML tagging and one on best practices to improve usability) that offer additional hints on making your code clean. Clean code is happy code. And, in the end, we all want our coding to be happy.