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IDIA 618 Dynamic Web Sites

Review 4 - Willcam HTML Tag List

David Pepper

The Willcam Tag List (http://www.willcam.com/cmat/html/tags.html) is [somewhat dated] tag list resource on the internet.

As a resource it has many virtues. Probably the best feature is it makes a huge effort to show the standards-development legacy of every tag. For example it shows which browser versions support it and the earlist version of the HTML standard (if any) it is supported by.

It also shows the syntactical use of the tag, clearly demonstrating at a glance whether it is paired or not. Furthermore, it is also amazingly good at exploring alternate sytaxes and deprecated tag arguments. This alone makes a lot of sense of legacy HTML code that you encounter from time to time.

Here are some highlights:

But probably the main reason why Willcam is a good site to think about for a class about Dynamic Web sites is that it isn't one. This is amazing because it really shows the potential and the limits of hand-coding HTML. If you browse source of the site it really looks to my eye to be all hand-done. It also seems insightful that the skills that make someone a master of HTML standards and hand-coding HTML doesn't necessarily tranisition perfectly to dynamic publishing methods.

To complete the critique, it also seems to be a totally home-grown user interface. The endless intrusion of the horizontal-rule advertisement for "CDI Corporate Education Services" is criminal, and the use of bookmarks and the convention of putting the "Finding Your Way Around..." menu somewhat below the fold is disappointing.

So in conclusion, it looks like Willcam will never evolve beyond HTML 3.2 in spite of it's awesome potential -- and all for want of a simple CMS. A pity.