The tips on this page will take advantage of new browser tags but will not effect how a page will look on older browsers.

Commenting your pages
Creating solid horizontal lines
Adding a subject line to the mailto tag
Choosing colours that will work in different browsers

Commenting your pages

You may place comments at the beginning and within the body of your document by using an exclamation mark followed by a couple of dashes: <!-- comment here --> These comments will only show up when viewing the document source and are very useful when more than one person must work on a single documents.

Creating solid horizontal lines

This tip is for IE 3.x and up, and Netscape 4.x and up. When you use horizontal lines in your page, by default you get a 3D line. However, if you prefer, you can add attributes to the <HR> tag to create a solid line with no 3D look. For example, the following code creates a horizontal line with a 3D effect to match half the width of the page <HR WIDTH=50%>

To change the look, you can use <HR WIDTH=100% COLOR="blue" NOSHADE>

which creates a solid blue line to match the width of the page--with no 3D effect.

Adding a subject line to the mailto tag

Would you like to know which page an email came from? Use "?subject=" to automatically place the defined text into the subject line of an email message as in the following example which uses <a href="mailto:webmaster@kidlink.org?subject=Web Tips">. Please help us add to this page by sending tips to the Kidlink Webmaster, thank you.

Choosing colours that will work in different browsers.

Netscape and Internet Explorer have different color palettes, so an 8-bit color that you choose using one browser may look completely different when displayed in another. To be sure that your color images look similar across browsers, confine your color choices to the 216 colors that are displayed similarly by both browsers. Here's how:

An 8-bit color is represented by a hex value made up of six hex numbers. The first two numbers represent the amount of red, the middle two the amount of green, and the last two the amount of blue (hence, the name, RGB value). If you confine your colors to any combination where red, green, and blue are represented by the hex numbers 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, or FF, your colors will be within the cross-browser color range. This gives you 6 possible values for red, for green, and for blue, or 6x6x6 color combinations, which equals 216 color values.