Bournemouth — Sep 15th 2015
Tony then introduced the main item of the evening, an introduction to the dark art of HTML by John Ansell.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN in the late 1980s. He had worked locally for a while in the 70s, including at Plessey in Poole.
HTML has evolved considerably over the intervening years and currently stands at version 5. The website www.w3schools.com was recommended as a valuable source of references and a tutorial.
John then went on to show a number of simple HTML pages, prepared using a text editor, in this case TextWrangler.
Using the first of these example pages, John introduced us to the essential concepts of HTML such as the document Head and Body, Markup tags and the hypertext link (or Anchor tag). He also showed what the resulting page looked like in a browser and how the layout changed as the window size was adjusted by the user.
With a second example, John showed how tags could be used for various aspects of text formatting, e.g. bold, italic and colour (or 'color' as it must be spelt in deference to our US cousins)
The third document explained the concept of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This is one of the later enhancements to HTML and provides a convenient way of imposing a consistent style on a number of web pages and allows easy changes to that style without the need to edit all of the pages separately.
John's remaining examples focussed on the incorporation of images and how to control their size and positioning, again illustrating how the appearance of the page is affected by the window size used by the user. This demonstration brought home the need to test your web site on as many different platforms and browsers as possible to be sure that it is going to appear as you intended.
Finally, an FTP agent is needed to upload your HTML pages to a suitable server. Cyberduck (available from the Mac App store) was John's choice here although on this particular evening it didn't seem too keen to perform.
John then fielded a number of questions, both from the point of view of writing HTML and what to do when other people's websites seem not to behave correctly - generally try another browser!
During the usual tea break, discussion continued, Steve and Mary receiving lots of help from chairman Mick on their recent switch back to an iMac after a spell of PC usage.
There then followed a general Q&A covering issues such as handling multiple user accounts on an iMac, choosing passwords, message forwarding from iPhone to iPad, and the difference between iMessages and SMS messages.
All in all, another very useful meeting, in spite of the limited attendance.
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