Dear Joyce: An adviser for an online career service dealt with the case of an employee who found a memo left in a printer with the details of a proposed merger. The employee confronted the boss who swore the employee to secrecy. The employee, feeling loyalty and friendship to co-workers, was struggling over the issue. The adviser said to keep quiet, that the leak would be traced and that the merger might not go through. Do you agree with this advice? -- R.M.

Dear R.M.: To an extent. The employee's big mistake was discussing the memo with the boss. Walls have ears. If word gets out, no matter how, management will blame the employee. If the merger goes through and mass layoffs result, co-workers will hate anyone who failed to give them a heads-up. If the current proposal fails, the company is merger-minded and will pursue another consolidation.

I suggest that the unfortunate employee who discovered that a merger is about to pounce on an unsuspecting workforce quickly move on to another job where hints can be dropped at a safe distance. Why risk playing cat-and-mouse games if you're the mouse?

Dear Joyce: I am starting out doing an HTML home study course for Web page design. But it deals more with FrontPage 2000 software, which seems to be pretty easy for now. But a lot of the Web designers I have talked to say it's a good thing to know HTML along with FrontPage 2000 software.

The problem is that I'm getting a million answers from different people in this field. What book should I buy that describes and gives detail about HTML and its codes? I am not looking for something too deep but something I can understand.

One more thing: What do you expect of the Web designer market? Since it's a wide field to start out with, what are the chances of finding a good job, and do you see the market for Web designers dropping or rising in the next few years? And what are other things dealing with Web design I should look into or look out for? -- B.R.I.

Dear B.R.I.: I remember a college professor saying that knowing the answers to everything isn't the goal of education -- it's knowing where to find the answers. Rebecca Smith, with www.EResumes.com, has centered on electronic employment issues for a decade, and I turned to her for smart answers to your questions.

Rebecca Smith's book, "Electronic Résumés and Online Networking, Second Edition," is the result of adult education courses she taught in Silicon Valley on beginning Web page design. She focused on the mechanics of HTML, optimizing meta tags, compressing files and much more within the context of having students create Web versions of their résumés.

Chapters 8, 9 and 10 supply step-by-step instructions on how to do this. While the techniques are simplified, they do demonstrate the fundamentals of HTML and Web page design within a real-life context. This should put you on the road to a clearer HTML understanding.

As for the Web designer's job market, Smith suggests that "A very good online resource to assess the Web designer's job market is the Association of Internet Professionals, where you can find chapters in your local area and attend the various presentations and talks, as well as network with industry professionals. I've attended the AIP sessions and highly recommend them."

New career paths, according to the current issue of "Newsweek" magazine, include wireless developers, who will provide programming and architecture for an Internet that is going wireless. Their coding tool "bears little resemblance to HTML programming." But most industry observers expect HTML to be around a long time.

Other high-tech opportunity knockers: Web security specialists to ward off lethal computer viruses and hack attacks; programming artists to merge high-end graphics with computer programming for animation, computer games and virtual media; robotics engineers to keep plugging away on robots -- a quarter-century of research has yet to yield a robot that can clean my house; and tech-support workers to figuratively take a hammer to all the frustrating problems technology brings with it.

Send career questions for possible use in this column to Joyce Lain Kennedy at Box 368, Cardiff, CA 92007, or e-mail her at jlk@sunfeatures.com. Sorry, the volume of mail makes personal replies impossible.

© 2000, Los Angeles Times Syndicate