HTML

Here are tips on writing webpages from scratch.

Tutorials

W3School is probably the best place to learn how to build a website.

Most standards are specified in http://www.w3.org/.

Besides, the website quirks modes offers many useful tips.

Symbols and pinyin

For HTML symbols, see the HTML symbols page.

Shapecatcher.com has an online tool to recognize hand-written symbols.

A simple pinyin input method (for common chinese character) can be found here: Pinyin input.

Debugging

Modern web browsers often has their own tools for debugging a webpage.

Internet Explorer 8 (or later) has Developer Tools under the Tools menu.

Opera has Opera Dragonfly (Ctrl+Shift+I) under Tools/Advanced. It can also be invoked without a menu: right click a page, choose Inspect Element.

Similar to Opera, Chrome also has Developer tools (Shift+Ctrl+I) under the Tools menu. It can also be invoked without a menu: right click a page, choose Inspect Element.

Firefox has a web developer console (Web developer/Web Console in version 6), which can output useful error messages.

W3C validator

W3C has a HTML validator to check if a web page is correctly written.

This page, for example, has passed the validation, as indicated by the button below.

However, it's usually over restrictive, e.g., it doesn't allow <applet> flag, which most browsers support very well.

W3C also has a link validator to check if any links are broken.