Accessing the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html (ciwah) newsgroup (and alt.html)

This document is outdated and mostly obsolete. (2012-03-28)

The purpose of the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html (ciwah) newsgroup has been defined as follows:

This newsgroup covers discussion of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) as it relates to web page authoring. Possible subjects include HTML editors, formatting tricks, and current and proposed HTML standards.

The group is very active - there might be a hundred or more new articles a day (many of them off-topic, sadly). Therefore, before asking your question there, please check whether it has already been asked and answered there. This will help in keeping the group useful, and you'll probably get a correct answer faster that way, or you may at least get information which will help you to formulate your question so that people can answer it better.

But even before doing a search, please check

• whether your question (and an answer to it) appears in The Web Design Group's Web Authoring FAQ
• whether your document has syntax errors which can easily be located using a validator such as the W3C validator (if your question relates to a particular page of yours which "does not work").
• The HTML 4 Specification by W3C, or the more legible but less official HTML 4.0 Reference by WDG, whenever you have questions about the syntax or use of an HTML construct.

Note: When you have found an article which discusses a problem similar to yours, you can select the "thread" (near the top of a page displaying the article) to see the context, or thread of articles, to which it belongs.

You can also access the ciwah group via Google Groups or access alt.html via Google Groups (The links here will give you a list of article headings, latest articles first.) See also other comp.infosystems.www.authoring.* groups, and if you intend to post to them, make sure you have checked their charters so that you post to the right group.

If you did not find a satisfactory answer and consider posting to ciwah, please include the address (URL) of your page, if you have problems with a particular page or construct. If you don't quite know how to do something in HTML, please include the address of your attempt to do it - it often says much more than long explanations of what you have done. Please do not post excerpts of HTML code (unless they are very short). And please select a descriptive subject line for our message. Something like "Please help me with my HTML problem" is hardly helpful; a subject line like "Problems with nested tables" would encourage experts on nested tables to tackle your problem.

And please read The c.i.w.a.h FAQ which tells some basic things about the group. It's a relatively short document, and it's automatically posted to the group several times a week, too.

If you would like to know how this page was done and perhaps do something similar, please consult my article Referring to Usenet news in HTML.