html tips and tags
This document is meant for html rookies. It is a collection of tricks and tags I use when writing html files which are not that easy to find. See this as a beginners guide for some special features of browsers and codes.
As with every tag and technique deriving from the html standard from the W3C many of the topics convered in this paper may not work with every browser you find. I am mostly working with the netscape series of graphical browsers and all topics should work with them at least. I have not tested the topics extensively with other software, because I think there will always be browsers behaving differently, so it is somewhat useless trying to get full compatibility. If you know any bugs, workarounds or even better please let me know and email me your comments to doj@cubic.org.

Contents

delivery of forms through email
Forms are used to deliver information to the web server other than just clicking on links. You can create forms with text and menue inputs. Normally the contents of the form are delivered to the web server or special cgi scripts. If you are not able to set up cgi-programs to process the requests from forms, you can simply send the contents to any email adress.

For example you could built a page with a form telling the user to submit comments about the page. The comments are then sent to a specified email adress. So you can just read them or feed any programm with this information, which must not be installed on the web server.

To envoke the email-support you simply have to insert the usual html email-url into the action field of the form.
<form action="mailto:youremail@yourhost.yourdomain">
<input name="textentry" size="40">
<input type="submit" value="send">
</form>

including sound files
I think there is no standard for including sound files into html language by now, so there are many ways. Browsers running under Microsoft Windows should know how to play midi files (if there is a sound card installed). As the majority uses these you can be sure 95% of the people accessing your page will hear music. But those browsers do not process the midi files themselves, but rely on plugins or the system functions to play the midi file. The are hundreds of different options to submit for those tag for all different plugins or players. I recommend not using them, as the result on different configurations is hardly predictable.

One way to start a midi music is to include it with a embed tag.
<embed src="./rock.mid">
This should start a midi player, if your browser knows how to handle midi files. Many plugins understand the autostart and loop option which control the playback of the music file. Also height and width are often used, if the plugin uses some user interface which will be included in the page. Another example how to start our midi file:
<embed src="./rock.mid" autostart="true" loop="true" width="100" height="50">
However the second example is less compatible with any imaginary plugin a user might habe installed and may not execute, although a midi player is available.

Another widely used music format is the .MOD format. There are a number of plugins capable of playing those files (and their relatives xm, s3m etc.). Again most of those plugins run only with Microsoft Windows environment. You can use the above tag embed and simply use the mod filename. This works for Real Audio files too.

automatical refreshing
Browsers can be advised to load the html page again with a special directive in the <head> container.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10">
The page will be reloaded every 10 seconds. This is useful for web cameras or counters generated by cgi-scripts which change rapidly. You can also point to another url by adding the path to the content field seperated with comma.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10,http://www.hornet.org">

using sans serif fonts
The html standard has no tag to change the standard font into a sans serif shaped. However you can use the <font> tag to advise the browser to load a different font. With the option face a different font is used. Computer history brought us various fonts. However a sans serif font was mostly available under the name of either arial, futura, helvetica. So we use these three names in our font tag and if the browser can find any of those font faces it will use them. This will work on Microsoft Windows, Macintosh and many Unix/Linux systems.
<font face="arial, futura, helvetica">


version 1.0 from 24. June 1998 - written by doj - homepage www.cubic.org