Lots of newbie questions

[ReadOnly]

I have lots of questions and will be putting them in this thread. Thank you for any help in advanced.

Here we go:

- Are mailto links deprecated? Currently I have a form that the use can fill out which provides the equivalent of a mailto link but in order to simplify the style of the page I could just use a mailto link. Should I or is the old school way of doing it.

- Should I minify? My page isn't very complicated and all the information is located on a single page. Will I actually benefit from minifying or just cause myself more headaches come time to edit?

- Pro/cons to loading javascipts outside of the page rather then in. Currently all my javascripts are located in .js and then loaded at the beginning of my page. Is this slower then just having the script in the same page? Is there any con to loading them outside of the page.

- Currently a stylesheet dictates the max width of page is 900px. Is this a good width to go with?

 

[Brian Angel]

I’m going to jump in before someone tells you to use some nifty and neat-o software that’s crap , or tells you “tables is where it’s at”, because you seem to want to really want to learn right.

1) Mailto is not depreciated. That being said, what it does is open the user’s mail client and force them to enter in information. Creating a form for contact is a much better way to go as it doesn’t open anything or even possibly ask the end user to configure anything. All this being said, I use both.

2) If you’re trying to learn, odds are at first don’t minify (well… upload to the server at the end the jQuery library if you’re doing it local). A basic sites kb saving by doing a minify probably won’t be worth it. As a second option, you can always save a copy of the non-minified version and then just upload the minified version to the server.

3) Java, stylesheets should always be loaded externally…. Always…..and forever…like Joni and Cachi. But load the java at the bottom, will help with page load.

4) 960 seem to be the in thing for page width wrapper as it breaks down better mathematically. But if you have one at 900 and one at 1000 and one at 700, doesn’t matter as long as it’s the look you and your client are going for.

I hope I helped… NO TABLES.. NO WIX.. NO CREATE YOUR OWN…..DAMNIT

 

[ReadOnly]

I’m going to jump in before someone tells you to use some nifty and neat-o software that’s crap , or tells you “tables is where it’s at”, because you seem to want to really want to learn right.

1) Mailto is not depreciated. That being said, what it does is open the user’s mail client and force them to enter in information. Creating a form for contact is a much better way to go as it doesn’t open anything or even possibly ask the end user to configure anything. All this being said, I use both.

2) If you’re trying to learn, odds are at first don’t minify (well… upload to the server at the end the jQuery library if you’re doing it local). A basic sites kb saving by doing a minify probably won’t be worth it. As a second option, you can always save a copy of the non-minified version and then just upload the minified version to the server.

3) Java, stylesheets should always be loaded externally…. Always…..and forever…like Joni and Cachi. But load the java at the bottom, will help with page load.

4) 960 seem to be the in thing for page width wrapper as it breaks down better mathematically. But if you have one at 900 and one at 1000 and one at 700, doesn’t matter as long as it’s the look you and your client are going for.

I hope I helped… NO TABLES.. NO WIX.. NO CREATE YOUR OWN…..DAMNIT

Yeah, I am newb but I am not that far off. Thanks for all the tips. It will actually help me turn something out that is closer to the W3C (because if you are going to do something, might as well do it right).

1) I think I am going to go with a mailto link and have the link be the e-mail address. Style-wise I can clean it up a bit and if for whatever reason the mailto link does not work, the address would still be available.

2) I probably will minify just for completion sake but I will do it after the site has been live for a while.

3) I didn't know about loading the javascripts at the bottom but it makes perfect sense.

4) And it is not too late to change my width. I will go with 960 if that is the unofficial "standard".


New question.
5) A good meta tag buildup. What is the "standard" on that one? I know I need more and I will be submitting this site to search engines.
This is what I have now:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>My Website</title>
...

Could anyone write me a quick template of what meta tags to include? Could you also include a spot for a favicon.