Hints & Tips

Select Before Tagging

Always select the text you want to format before choosing the appropriate HTML formatting tag - otherwise you'll keep getting the irritating message that High Tea displays when you forget!

Document Sections

High Tea automatically puts the default document sections into each new document. These are essentailly tags for the HTML document, its Header and its body. Under almost all occasions, these sections are ignored or not necessary and I was going to leave them out completely until Netscape introduced wallpaper which seems to require being the first item after the body tag!

Netscapes Extensions

Whilst I was writing High Tea, more HTML extensions were announced from Netscape - I'm never quite sure whether these are just Netscape-only extensions (i.e. only the Netscape browser will interpret them) or whether they will eventually be included in other browsers - so just be warned that somethings may be dependent upon the browser you and, ultimately, your viewing public use.

Wallpaper

A friend of mine went into raptures about wallpaper when it first came out as if it would completely revolutionise the way web pages look. Well, he was absolutely right - but on the whole I have to say that, in my opinion, wallpaper should be treated with caution. For a start it, it takes longer to load a document that uses wallpaper and, if that isn't bad enough, when it loads you have difficulty reading the text. The golden rule here of course is, if you're going to use wallpaper, then make sure the image you choose is suitable and allows the overlying text to be legible.

Tables

I approach table creation from a "smallest upwards" perspective. In other words, I define the table items and headings first, then the table rows, then finally the table itself with all its borders cell padding etc. This seems simpler and easier on the eye than wading through in a largest-first manner.

Known Bugs & Problems

I know of two that I can't really fix:

• Vertical lines appearing - for some strange reason, two or three vertical lines occasionally appear on the screen. These cause no obvious problems with the way High Tea works and disappear the next time High Tea redraws the screen. As to what's causing it - if anyone's got any suggestions I'd be pleased to hear them!

• Speed - High Tea works fine on any 68040-based Mac or above - I've tried it on an LC 475, a Performa 630 and PowerMac 8100 and it goes like a rocket. However, on less powerfull machines such as my own aged IIci, it struggles a bit - particularly when scrolling the text - soz, but there's nothing I can do about this.

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank all the guys at CBuzz (Brighton on-line magazine) for advice, HTML expertise and testing. In particular, Tim and Ant for tea and food and enthusiasm, but most of all Jerry who had the patience to hammer High Tea into the ground and run up a huge phone bill by constantly phoning me with bug reports - Thanks Jerry - without testing software development would just be a very complicated shot in the dark!

Thanks must also go to John Pugh for his excellent HPopupMenu XFCN which is one of the most useful XFCNs around.

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