HTML Files for Dummies

Blank HTML page

Some of our least favorite DotD candidates are the ones that pretend to provide instructions but leave out all the parts that are more than a little "hard." We see a (not) surprising number of such posts in the niches put up by the former eHow.com, where many J-school graduates plied their trade, such as it is. It always surprises us, however, when someone who claims to have the requisite background botches the instructions, like Katelyn Kelley did in the Techwalla.com post, "How to Create a Blank HTML Page."

Kelley¹, who claims to have a "Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and computer science" pretty much blew the hard part. Despite her fifteen years' experience as a "web manager," she somehow forgot to give actual instructions for this simple task. Oh, she managed to tell people how to create a blank page with a commercial software package, but when it came to something anyone can do, software or no? Not so much...

Katelyn started out by trying to explain the process by using Notepad (note to Kelley: not everyone runs Windows...). According to her introduction,

"[An] HTML page is simply a text document with special codes at the top that identify it as a Web page to Web browsers..."

...which is true, although she forgot to mention that the codes need to be closed somewhere around the end of the file. Where Kelley let her readers down is in the execution. According to Katelyn, the process goes like this:

"Open the text editor application. The Windows Notepad application is located in the directory C:\Windows\System32."

Is she kidding? NOBODY goes looking for the Notepad application in the system directory: it's right there on the START menu, Katelyn!

"Type the HTML codes that define a text document as a Web page:"

We don't know about Kelley, but we think good instructions would include the codes she so blithely mentions. You know, perhaps something like,

	<!DOCTYPE HTML>
	<html>
	<body>
	</body>
	</html>

When it comes time to finish up, Kelley told her readers,

"Click the File menu and select 'Save As.' By default, Notepad wants to save all files as plain text with .TXT as the extension. For an HTML file, enter a file name with the .HTM extension."

Anthropomorphism notwithstanding, that won't always work: in order to save this as an .html file in older versions of Windows, you'd need to select "All Files" from the file type box before assigning the extension, otherwise the file would be a text file named "text.htm.txt."

We'd like to think that anyone with as much experience as Kelley claims would have done a much better job of outlining the process and had fewer glaring errors. We've learned, however, that one can never overestimate the dumbassery of our Dumbass of the Day.

¹ Also known as Catherine Chant, author of YA romances/fantasy books

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Monday, January 20, 2020

HTML Files for Dummies

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