WebspaceWorks Resources

Links: Cheat sheets & assorted miscellany

This page is just a collection of various bits and pieces useful to html/css and general web development that don’t conveniently fit anywhere else, or where there’s not enough to warrant a category of their own.

HTML Character Entities

W3C Definitive HTML Entities Guide

Definitive it may be, but clarity is not its strong point

Adrian Roselli’s HTML Entities Charts

Much more usable HTML entity charts, with links to other useful information on typographic style and why these things are important to the web. Adrian’s article was originally written for evolt, from where it is also still available and better suited to online reading.

Alan Wood’s HTML Entity reference

Character entities for HTML 4.0, HTML 4.01 and XHTML broken down by unicode range and accessible through an alphabetic list. Page uses frames.

Colours for web design

The first four links in this list offer alternative implementations of interactive tools to build colour schemes based upon sound application of colour theory. In doing this they also provide effective illustration of how colours work together and so are also excellent learning aids for this aspect of graphic design.

Color Wizard

The Color Wizard from Colors on the Web is a simple to use color matching application for anyone who wants to create designs with great looking colors.

Look for the “Launch Color Wizard” link half way down the linked page that will open the tool in a new window.

Colour Scheme Generators from the Well Styled CSS & Webdesign Workshop

Comes in Original and updated versions.

Taylored Marketing

Excellent alternative colour chart (not web-safe) providing colour names, rgb triplets and hex codes for a range of subtle shades.

Visibone Colorlab of “Web-safe” colours

Convenient web-safe colour selection by clicking in the colour wheel at the top left of the screen. The initial load of the page includes an optional survey/marketing form.

Cheat sheets for Web Development

For those essential bits of information that can never be found when you most need them at your fingertips.

Dave Child’s Cheat Sheet collection

Really Useful Stuff™ from the “Added Bytes” website, including

• HTML Entities: Crib sheet of all the html codes for weird and wonderful characters not directly available through the keyboard
• CSS: A quick reference guide for CSS, listing selector syntax, properties, units and other useful bits of information.
• Javascript: A quick reference guide for JavaScript, listing methods and functions, and including a guide to regular expressions and the XMLHttpRequest object.
• MySql: A quick reference guide for MySQL, including functions (both in MySQL and PHP), data types, and sample queries.
• PHP: Quick summary of PHP that is frequently all that’s needed, saving the trip to php.net!
• Ruby on Rails: A quick reference guide for Ruby on Rails, containing the default directory structure, predefined variables, methods, reserved words and regular expression syntax.
• mod_rewrite: A quick reference guide for mod_rewrite, including server variables, flags and regular expression syntax. Comes complete with examples of many commonly-used rules.
• Hex Colour chart of the 216 “web-safe” colours

Each linked page provides a description of the cheat sheet, and links to the PDF and PNG versions for download. Best of all, they are available under a Creative Commons License.

Visibone Resources

Commercially available (plus some free of charge) web development reference materials covering Color, Fonts, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.