You do not have to be too eagle-eyed to notice that I have not done much changing of the web site arrangement despite it getting six months on from when I first mentioned it. It will happen eventually, but changing cosmetics is probably the most boring bit of webmastering, even if it is important. There are certain elements of the site that get more and more clumsy as the content builds so I will be forced into changes eventually.

On thing I have been doing is to learn a little more about the editing process itself. When I first started editing my own home page I bought a book giving the basics. This was 'Creating a Web Site', by Bruce Durie, published by How to Books. I very rarely buy books on computing because I get irritated by the inflated prices we have to pay in this country. However, I knew nothing about web site design and the book was clearly written for newbies without being patronising. I got it in that dying breed, a bookshop with an owner rather than a manager for a chain. Up until now I have been using this book, together with copying other people's code, to maintain the ICPUG site. In passing I have commented a few times on the irritations of Front Page Express and Word 97 in editing HTML.

I recently was looking through my local Ottakars bookshop and found one of those books I really like. Entitled 'HTML Complete', published by Sybex, it was like a reference book. It cost $19.99 which translated into £16.99, still a rip-off, but it looked as if it was going out of print and it looked as if it had complete reference tables to HTML4 and JavaScript, which I was now getting interested in. I bought it and found that like a lot of the 'xxxx Complete' series it was a collection of chapters from various other Sybex books. Nevertheless, it is good. I would recommend it to budding webmasters, if you can still get it. Initially all 'xxxx Complete' books were $19.99 but translated into anything from £14.99 to £18.99, depending on title. Sybex now appear to have standardised on £14.99, which is printed on the cover so bookshops cannot charge anything dearer! I am moderately happy with that!

Anyway, I found two interesting things in this new book. First, it did not recommend the use of <BLOCKQUOTE> as an HTML tag to create white space either side of text. This was because in some browsers it may not get interpreted simply as adding white space. It may also go into italic for example. <BLOCKQUOTE> is supposed to be used when quoting from another source. Unfortunately their recommendation was to use <PRE> or style sheets. The former has unfortunate side effects, (like a fixed width font), and I have not had time to learn how to use the latter. In this E-Journal I have decided to use tables instead of <BLOCKQUOTE>. Please tell me if it causes you any difficulty. Tables cause Word 97 difficulty, (they cannot be nested and it insists on using absolute sizes rather than percentages), but I get round that by using Notepad to insert the table when I have completed the article!

The second thing I found from my new book is that JUSTIFY is not a valid HTML keyword for formatting text. I thought it was just a quirk of Word 97 that it did not have a justify button on the HTML toolbar and that Front Page Express simply erased all mention of JUSTIFY! Silly me. I found that if I cut and pasted justified text from Word format to an HTML document and did not save it afterwards then IE would display the text justified. My assumption was that JUSTIFY was added into the HTML spec after my beginners book was published. I guess in reality it was added by Microsoft so I am not sure how it displays in Navigator or other browsers. However, I like justified text for journal type articles so I am still going to use it! I just hope future HTML specifications will include JUSTIFY as an option, (along with allowing multiple spaces between words and paragraphs if they really want to be helpful). Once again, let me know if my use of JUSTIFY is causing problems.

Happy Surfing.