Style

**Some of These Style Rules will not make sense until you have mastered more HTML. Newbies should stick to 1-3**

1. Match your tags: There should be start and end tags for all except the paragraph tags. Some HTML editors offer an automatic tag close feature so you don't have to type as much.
   
   
2. Be consistent: Get in the habit of coding certain tags certain ways. For example I always like for my <p> tags to be lower case and my <H1> tags to be upper-case.
   
   
3. Use indentations and spaces in your code to make it more easily readable. HTML ignores manual formating unless you use the <pre> tag anyway
   
   
4. Try not to use depreciated tags whenever possible. Some tags are slowly becoming obsolete as people learn to use style sheets and the style element. Using legacy tags may lead to your page not working properly in the future.
   
   
5. Capital Letters and Bolding:Do NOT use entire paragraphs worth of all capital letters. Capital letters or bolding should be reserved to a few words throughout the page, never an entire page.
   
   
6. Never, Ever Use Background Music: Nothing says worthless and tacky faster than background music. Some people surf the internet at night, or in quiet places. Most computers have multimedia capabilities, i.e., speakers attached. If you combine these two ingredients with some obxiously loud background music which comes on at roughly the volume level of an airliner taking off you have the user hitting the back button as fast as possible.
   
   
7. It's Called a Dictionary. It is natural that as your webpage grows you will have some spelling errors slip by you. But pages and pages of spelling errors = user hits the back button because you obviously don't have a clue.
   
   
8. Frames:There are two very polar views on the subject of frames. Some people absolutely loathe frames. I feel frames should be used sparingly. They are best used on pages where a user will most likely click on a navigational menu many times. Tables or CSS are far better ways of organizing information on a web page.
   
   
9. Animated Gifs: They are fun and cute. Feel free to use a few here and there but don't plaster your page with them.
   
   
10. Right-Click Disable: In a word, don't. Don't use fancy javascripts to block a user's ability to right click a page, just because you are paranoid about someone using your pictures. Any picture posted on the internet, belongs to the public. If you don't want your picture to be borrowed, don't post it on the web.
    
    
11. Use web ready graphics. Buy, beg, borrow, or download a graphics program. Learn to use it. Don't post bitmap files to the web. Use jpg, jpeg, gif, or png formats of graphics. Also COMPRESS your pictures. A 1 megabyte picture is the fastest way to have a user hit the back button immediately.
    
    
12. Flash Animations:These are the greatest bandwidth clogging pieces of trash to ever plague the net. Never require a user to download flash just to navigate your site. Why? Because flash files are enormous and they take forever to download on a dial-up and they are obnxious to begin with. If you need flashy animation stick with animated gifs.
    
    

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