Here I've collected links about topics related to designing and maintaining a website. Most are about HTML, other stuff like cheap hosts, free graphics or counters is farther down in the resources section.
Use it as little as possible, if you use it at all. One of the things I like most in Opera is the ease with which it lets you turn off JavaScript support. I rarely turn it on now.
There certainly are a few good uses for JavaScript, but most of the things you can do with it (and are usually done with it) are simply annoying. Popups (though there are legitimate uses for them, too), cursor trails, automatic window resizing, or that nasty right click disabling.
But if you really think you have to, here are a few sites that will teach you how.
This is actually a somewhat historical sections. Most of these articles were written in the mid-90s, when the internet (and the web) suddenly went mainstream.
Blasting your links to every list on the net will probably get you a lot of hits. Doing so won't necessarily get you hits from people who care much about what you're doing. Curiosity seekers, cybersurfers, the bored, the jaded, the lost, the lonely, the heavy, the hot, the horny and the three foot tall pseudo-extraterrestrial mendicant part time stockbroker wannabees from an unnamed suburb of Milwaukee will all serve to rack up your hit counter, if you have one — they'll also soak up bandwidth and make your page less accessible for the people you really want to reach.
Have you ever wondered how they work? Well basically, when you put a counter on your page, you inline a small graphic that is stored on the server of the counter service. Whenever your webpage gets a hit, this graphic gets a hit too.
Counters first turned up around 1995. At that time they infuriated many netizens of long standing:
"You are the 2,317th visitor to this page." Yeah, like we care. On Yahoo's and Alta Vista's web it takes no effort at all to find and bounce off every page on the planet with a reference to (say) credenzas or toe jam. In this brave new world, hit counters are nothing but a particularly moronic form of ego display, impressing only the lemming-minded. They may tell you how many people got suckered into landing on a glitzy splash page, but they won't even hint how many muttered "losers!" and surfed out again faster than you can say "mouse click". To add injury to insult, hit counters screw up page caching, heaping more load on the Internet's wires. — From ESR's HTML Hell Page
By now, I think, nobody thinks of them as an insult any more. But since more and more websites are hosted on professional servers, and their maintainers thus have full access stats, they are a vanishing phenomenon.
I am not a great friend of them, nearly everything you see on this site is done in EditPad and nothing else. But my interest was renewed when I tried to install some sort of HTML viewer on an old 386 with Windows 3.1. The old browsers wouldn't run without an Internet connection, it seems, so an HTML editor was the better option.
Arachne would probabely have worked, but it lists SVGA among its minimum requirements, and this computer has only a VGA card.
