James Wilding's Weblog

Miso – font, not soup

Cool, architectural-drawing-style font from Omkrets (website). Might use this on a secret project I’ve got cooking :-)

Unsung heros of HTML

I’ve just bought and read HTML & XHTML Pocket Reference. It’s a useful book that’s taught me a few new HTML tags (and I thought I knew them all!).

Whatever you think of semantic HTML, these are essential for any die-hard web geek ;-)

<samp>...</samp>

Sample output from programs and scripts. I’d use this rather than <code> (or within <code> tags) to indicate that the content was an example output of, say, a ruby script.

$ ruby random_password.rb # => <samp>mSeq15H3j8</samp>

<dfn>...</dfn>

Use to indicate the defining instance of the enclosed term (probably the first time you use a special name or acronym):

…The British Broadcasting Corporation (<dfn>BBC</dfn>)…

<button>...</button>

Replaces your boring old form submit button with something classier, using an image:

<button name="submit" id="submit">
<img src="images/submit_button.png" />
</button>

<base />

Use in a document’s <head> to define the base path for all relative URLs in the document. This could be useful if you’re writing a blog, want all your links to start with articles, and are lazy:

<html>
<head>
<base href=”/articles/” />
</head>
<body>
<!– links to /articles/how-to-make-millions –>
<a href=”how-to-make-millions”>read this</a>
</body>
</html>

Lastly, did you know that the <address> tag isn’t meant to be used for any just address? I didn’t. It’s actually intended for marking up the address of the author of an HTML document. I wonder how many people follow that convention :-)