IST129 - Ch 15: Tips, Tricks, and Hacks

This chapter deals with tricks that you can play/use to enhance your web pages. Some of the suggestins involve JavaScript while others make imaginative use of TABLES. I will only cover 2 of the 10 or so tricks/tips.

Custom Bullets:

This section of the book (p. 476) describes how to use the Definition List to create a custom-bulleted, unordered list. The following HTML code uses a dummy defintion tag (<dt>) followed immediately by a data definition (<dd>) tag:

Club

Faking multi-column layout with Tables:

This section (p. 476) describes how tyo use tables to simulate mutli-column layouts in your HTML. The trick is to create white space between cells, turn off the border, and use a dummy cell between the columns as the following HTML code illustrates:

Archtop guitars became available just prior to 1920 as manufacturers looked for ways to distinguish their products from a growing number of brands. At this time, manufactuers like Washburn, Martin, and Gibson made flattop guitars... blah-blah...
fffffffffffffff ggggggggggggggggggggg hhhhhhhhhhhhh iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk lllllllllllll mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn oooooooooooooooooooo ppppppppppppp pppppppppppppppppp qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr sssssssssssss tttttttttttttttttt uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

The problem with using this technique is that use of line breaks (<br>) or paragraphs (<p>) within either column tends to throw the other columns off. Also you should have the same amount of text in one column as another or your columns will not be 50-50! Keep in mind that the better <multicol> tag is only available in Netscape.