HTML, XHTML & CSS

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Part II: Formatting Web Pages with (X)HTML
To avoid problems with files on your Web site, follow a standard naming
convention. Often, using only lowercase letters can simplify your life.
✓ Check the extension. Bios.htm and Bios.html are two different
files. If your link’s URL uses one extension and the actual filename uses
another, your link won’t work.
To avoid problems with extensions on your Web site, pick either .html
or .htm and stick to that extension.
✓ Check the filename. For example, bio.html and bios.html are two
different files.
✓ Copy and paste. Avoid retyping a URL if you can copy it. The best and
most foolproof way to create a URL that works is as follows:
a. Load a page in your browser.
b. Copy the URL from the browser’s address or link text box.
c. Paste the URL into your (X)HTML markup.
The copy-and-paste method for grabbing URLs presumes that you’re grabbing
them from a Web site somewhere. If you open a local file on your PC in
a browser, you’ll see something that looks like this: file:\\\I:\H4D6e\
html_letter.html. Here’s how to decipher it all:
✓ file:\\\ is an Internet Explorer convention used to identify the document
as a file in your local file system.
✓ I:\ is a drive letter.
✓ H4D6e\ is a folder or directory on that drive.
✓ html_letter.html — the rightmost text element, in this case — is the
name of the HTML file you opened.
You can’t use URLs like this on a Web site, so please — don’t try to!
Most of us have had a letter returned to us at least once marked undeliverable
because of an incomplete or inaccurate address. When the address isn’t
correct, the post office has no way of knowing how to locate the intended
recipient. The same is true for URLs. Without a fully formed URL, Web servers
don’t know how to locate the target Web page. URLs generally take the
following form:
✓ Protocol identifier followed by a colon (:) — This is generally either
http for Hypertext Transport Protocol, https for secure-server sites,
or ftp for file transfer sites.