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Got my Visibone HTML Card

Monday, September 17th, 2001 at 7:31 PM Category: Meryl's Notes Blog No comments

Got my Visibone HTML Card today! Thanks to Shirley for pointing it out to me. I needed a resource that had everything in one shot so I didn’t have to go digging through HTML books for HTML code and special characters. Plus, no looking for a CSS book for the CSS properties. I only knew Visibone as the color king and use it in Photoshop. Never realized Bob Stein and Co. also printed these incredible cards. This stuff uses high quality materials and the no glare lamination will keep it protected from a 2-year-old’s spills and a 7-year-old’s messes.

It covers HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.1, CSS2, and Special Characters. That’s not even everything in it. There’s practically a book shoved into these four pages and I can keep it on my desk between the monitor and the CPU for quick access. The legend makes it easy to find things quickly. Case in point, whenever you see a chain (link), the item has to do with URLs / links. If you see a green (or blue) critter… it’s a ladybug. Yes, a picture of a bug as well as a bug with the browser. Thank goodness, they didn’t use a spider.

I find the HTML-CSS Functional Index incredibly useful. Items in blue are HTML and items in purple are CSS. The two are grouped together by elements so you know what works together. For example: Bold. It shows <b> and <strong> in blue to represent HTML. Then for CSS, you’ll see {font-weight}. It’s nice to see the association without having to rely on the little gray cells.

Also included is a HTML to XHTML checklist. If you’re trying to convert HTML documents to XHTML, refer to this list to know what needs changing to meet XHTML standards. Wow, it even has tidbits on SSI and Universal Resource Locators.

Damn, I wish I had this when it first came out or better yet, when I first started learning HTML then I could’ve upgraded cards! Would be a lot easier than upgrading books. Hey, book publishers… don’t panic. I won’t give up buying my beloved books.

I finally memorized some of the more frequent special characters, but it was always a pain to find them in my books or online especially since I could never find them listed in the index. I can just whip this thing out and turn to the back page. Ta-da! Instant special character listing. Instead of skipping accents altogether out of laziness, I can start adding them since it’ll take two seconds to find it. á ñ α How about that?

Yes, I used more superlatives than I normally would in my writing, but this resource is that good.