i know next to nothing

[spotted zebra]

Ok i am a complete noob to this field but i want to learn. I tried to build my own website with Publisher but apparently you can't create a website that way... who knew, not me obviously.

So i have taken a basic C++ class but have since forgotten most it, other than that i have played with linux code and a small amount of windows but nothing to speak of really.

I am wanting to know where i should start, i didn't really understand where i could post a question like this so i just looked for the most general forum on here. I think the first thing i need is a text editor, where can i find one of those?

Thanks for any and all posts

[LeeU]

You can use any text editor. You should start by learning HTML/CSS together.

[Moved to a better forum]

[Fang]

http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/myfirstsite/

[Joseph Witchard]

My favorite text editor is Notepad2. Google it for the download. It's completely free:)

Start with HTML and CSS. I found that those areas were the easiest to learn. Most people don't have this trouble like I did, but I had books on PHP and JavaScript scripting, but I wasn't able to learn the languages worth a flip until I got into college. Before I got too sick, I was a computer programming major, and I took a class on basic programming logic and a class on Microsoft Visual Basic. I didn't really make much of a dent in web scripting until I learned how programming languages worked.

[Declan1991]

Notepad++ is my favourite editor. I'd strongly suggest that you learn HTML and CSS together, because otherwise you'll pick up bad habits. That will give you all the techniques for laying out websites, but if you want to progress further, you'll have to start on a server-side language like PHP, and then you're C++ will come in handy because that is a programming language in the sense that it's not static.

[Stephen Philbin]

Something worth mentioning that is not usually mentioned is a setting in your editor for how your files are stored on disk: character encoding.

Whichever editor you choose, go through the editor's options and look for an option to set the default character encoding for files that you write. I would strongly suggest that you set it to something like ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8.

Try to make sure that the character encoding you use when saving your files is the same as the encoding specified by your http server and indicated in an HTML <meta> tag. My personal preference is UTF-8, but most people are fine with ISO-8859-1. I guess the most important thing is to be consistent.

[Joseph Witchard]

And if you do end up using Notepad2, it doesn't have that option when you save your files (at least not that I've found). But I always specify the character encoding in my meta section anyway.

[Stephen Philbin]

In my preferred editor the default encoding is specified in the options menu (rather than at the time you sive the file), but you can also change the encoding on a per-file basis.

I doesn't really matter how the setting is applied. The important thing is that you at least try to get it right. Incorrect character encodings can cause bugs/errors in pages and scripts that can be very difficult to identify and eliminate. Especially for people that are just starting out. It's usually better to just choose an encoding that works and stick with it so that you don't have to worry about the finer details of encodings until you've already got a decent understanding of the essentials of web development.

Here's a simplified guide to choosing between the three encodings you're most likely to see on the web.

ASCII — Great if you live in 1970's America, but not very useful for communicating with/about most places outside of the 50 states.

ISO-8859-1 — Covers most of the characters most Americans and Europeans are likely to use. There are more sections such as ISO-8859-2, ISO-8859-3 and so on, but I don't know which groupings of characters each one covers. As far as I know, they're for groupings of non-Latin-based characters.

UTF-8 — My personal preference. Covers ever everything except a few cases that only people with beards on their beards care about. UTF-8 can make file sizes larger depending on how often characters outside of the English alphabet are used, but doesn't usually have a significant impact for most Europeans. It's also possible to reduce some bloating by using UTF-16. UTF-16 would make the file size of a mostly European text file increase significantly, but would also significantly reduce the bloating of a text file that was, for example, mostly Japanese or Chinese. So, because I'm a European sort of chap, I use UTF-8.