dretlinks
Erik Wilde's list of interesting WWW links
This is a list of links which, in my very personal opinion, are very useful resources for learning more about Web technologies. This list of links is a subset of the links used by me for writing my book "Wilde's WWW", which is a survey of Web technologies in general. If you are interested in a list of books rather than links to Web sites, please visit the dretbooks page of books.
Standards Organizations
Standards Indices
Internet/Web History
- Hobbes'
Internet Timeline (HIT)
[This is the unofficial history of the Internet as seen by one member of the ISOC. HIT is updated regularly and contains an entertaining mixture of relevant figures and fun facts.]
Character Sets and Encodings
HTML
CSS
XML/SGML
SVG
- W3C's SVG page
- Adobe's SVG Web page
[Adobe is pretty interested in SVG and provides a very attractive Web page. An SVG plug-in (for IE on PC/Mac) can be downloaded, and a lot of fancy SVG samples are available. Furthermore, a very good tutorial on SVG is presented, demonstrating various degrees of sophistication.]
Web-Browsers
- Microsoft Internet Explorer
[The one and only. Currently by far the best browser available, in terms of performance and in terms of implementing standards. Microsoft has transformed amazingly well from trying to push its own standards to implementing real standards. Even Internet Explorer does not correctly implement the most important standards (HTML 4.0 and CSS1), but it is much closer to doing so than any other contender.]
- Netscape Navigator
[Navigator used to be a good (and almost the only serious) browser, but it has certainly lost the race against Internet Explorer. Navigator is far behind in implementing standards, is rather buggy, and sometimes displays perfectly correct pages amazingly wrong. However, it still is wide-spread and pages should be designed in a way that Navigator can display them properly.]
- Opera
[This may become a real contender for Internet Explorer. Currently lagging behind in features and implementing standards, the browser looks promising. The disadvantage is that it costs money, but this may be money well spent, if Opera continues its efforts to develop a full-featured alternative to Internet Explorer and Navigator.]
- W3C Amaya
[This browser/editor has some nice features, like the structure view of a document. It is W3C's experimental browser to implement new standards and features. It is nice to try out, and particularly useful for testing pages in terms of browser compatibility, but it is not usable on a regular basis (at least not for me).]
Web-Servers
- Apache Software Foundation
[The official site and source of the Apache Web server. The Web-site for documentation and downloads of Apache.]
- Apache Week
[An online magazine dedicated to the Apache Web server. This is an ideal place to start if you are not interested in documentation and downloads of Apache, but more in problem-oriented descriptions of what can be done with the Apache Web server. The site provides an archive containing all previous articles.]
Web Design (not limited to one Technology)
- Jakob Nielsen's Website on Usable Information Technology
[This Website should be recommended reading for all Web page designers. Some of the views of Jakob Nielsen may be too strong to be agreed upon by everyone, but usability definitely is something that is greatly underestimated on the Web. Nielsen publishes a bi-weekly column which is a good way to stay informed.]
- Web pages that suck
["Learn good design by looking at bad design", this is the motto of the site. So only visit this page if you have a high threshold for visually inflicted pain. However, the site is pretty informative (and funny in many places) and makes a good companion to Jakob Nielsen's Web site, demonstrating many bad design techniques that are widely used on the Web.]
- ZDnet Developer Resources Site
Validators (usable online)
Various Tools (usable online)
- ZDNet Load Check
[The link check page makes it possible to check the links on every page, it detects broken links and provides checks for one page only or a complete site. It also creates a summary page for the links that have been tested. Very useful.]
- ZDNet Link Check
[The load check page loads a page and creates statistics about the page itself and all other resources required for displaying the page (like images). It rates the page, and it even makes it possible to look at some more compressed variants of images and to upload these if required.]
- Adobe online tools
[Adobe provides services for banner and graphics creation, and for optimizing graphics for the Web. Basically, these are teasers for Adobe's products, but they are still useful, and are nice examples of how future applications provided over the Web may look like.]
Statistics
- Collection of links to statistics sites, some of which are free, others require a (sometimes costly) subscription.
- W3C Web Characterization Activity
[This is not a specific study or survey, but an effort of W3C to create a place where surveys, studies, statistics, and reports can be found. The goal of the Web Characterization Activity is to characterize the Web, develop real world test scenarios, and to provide information for the Web community how the Web is currently being used and anticipated use in the near future.]
- Search Engine Watch
[Search Engine Sizes and other interesting statistics and informations.]
- Netcraft
[Netcraft's famous Server Survey and other statistics about the Web's Server population.]
- Netnames
[Simple DNS statistics about how many entries are registered in each domain.]
- Global Reach
[Statistics about numbers and languages of Internet/Web users.]
- StatMarket
[Various statistics about the web, inclusing browsers, operating systems, and screen resolutions.]
If you have any comments or suggestions regarding this page, please let me know. It is impossible to keep track of all sites on the Web, so it may very well happen that I leave out some excellent sites or do not recognize that a link is no longer valid...
