Synopses & Reviews
HTML and its XML-based descendant, XHTML, are the fundamental languages for working on the web, and the new edition of our popular HTML guide offers web developers a better way to become fluent in these languages. HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition is the most comprehensive, up-to-date book available on HTML and XHTML. It covers Netscape Navigator 6, Internet Explorer 6, HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, CSS2, and all of the features supported by the popular web browsers.
Learning HTML and XHTML is like learning any new language. Most students first immerse themselves in examples. Studying others is a natural way to learn; however, it's as easy to learn bad habits through imitation as it is to acquire good ones. The better way to become HTML-fluent is through a comprehensive reference that covers the language syntax, semantics, and variations in detail and demonstrates the difference between good and bad usage.
In HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, the authors cover every element of HTML/XHTML in detail, explaining how each element works and how it interacts with other elements. Tips about HTML/XHTML style help you write documents ranging from simple online documentation to complex presentations. With hundreds of examples, the book gives you models for writing your own effective web pages and for mastering advanced features like style sheets and frames.
HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition, shows how to:
- Use style sheets to control a document's appearance
- Work with programmatically generated HTML
- Create tables, from simple to complex
- Use frames to coordinate sets of documents
- Design and build interactive forms and dynamic documents
- Insert images, sound files, video, Java applets, and JavaScript programs
- Create documents that look good on a variety of browsers
- Make the transition to XHTML
The book comes with a handy quick-reference card listing HTML/XHTML tags.
Synopsis
As the premier front running HTML book, this guide functions as both a solid tutorial and a comprehensive reference.
About the Author
Chuck Musciano has spent his life on the East Coast, having spent time in Maryland, Georgia, and New Jersey before acquiring a B.S. in computer science from Georgia Tech in 1982. Since then, he has resided in Melbourne, Florida, in the employ of Harris Corporation. He began his career as a compiler writer and crafter of tools and went on to join Harris' Advanced Technology Group to help develop large-scale multiprocessors. This led to a prolonged interest in user-interface research and development, which finally gave way to his current position, manager of UNIX Systems in Harris' Corporate Data Center. Along the way, he grew to know and love the Internet, having contributed a number of publicly available tools to the Net and started the still-running Internet Movie Ratings Report. The Web was a natural next step, and he has been running various Web sites within and without Harris for several years. Chuck has written on UNIX-related topics in the trade press for the past decade, most visibly as the "Webmaster" columnist for Sunworld Online (http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline). In his spare time he enjoys life in Florida with his wife Cindy, daughter Courtney, and son Cole.
Bill Kennedy is currently president and chief technical officer of ActivMedia, Inc., a new media marketing and marketing research company based in beautiful Peterborough, NH, but which conducts business with clients and associates from around the world primarily over the Internet (http://www.activmedia.com). When not hacking new HTML pages or writing about them, "Dr. Bill" (Ph.D. in biophysics from Loyola University of Chicago, of all things!) is out promoting a line of mobile, autonomous robots as real-world platforms for artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic research and for education (http://www.rwii.com). Or he's out drumming up writing assignments from his former colleagues at IDG's SunWorld/Advanced Systems Magazine (now SunWorld Online; http://www.sun.com), where he served as a senior editor-features (at-large over the Internet, of course) for nearly five years. Contact Dr. Bill directly at [email protected].
Table of Contents
Dedication; Preface; Our Audience; Text Conventions; Versions and Semantics; HTML Versus XHTML; Comments and Questions; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: HTML, XHTML, and the World Wide Web; 1.1 The Internet; 1.2 Talking the Internet Talk; 1.3 HTML and XHTML: What They Are; 1.4 HTML and XHTML: What They Aren't; 1.5 Standards and Extensions; 1.6 Tools for the Web Designer; Chapter 2: Quick Start; 2.1 Writing Tools; 2.2 A First HTML Document; 2.3 Embedded Tags; 2.4 HTML Skeleton; 2.5 The Flesh on an HTML or XHTML Document; 2.6 Text; 2.7 Hyperlinks; 2.8 Images Are Special; 2.9 Lists, Searchable Documents, and Forms; 2.10 Tables; 2.11 Frames; 2.12 Style Sheets and JavaScript; 2.13 Forging Ahead; Chapter 3: Anatomy of an HTML Document; 3.1 Appearances Can Deceive; 3.2 Structure of an HTML Document; 3.3 Tags and Attributes; 3.4 Well-Formed Documents and XHTML; 3.5 Document Content; 3.6 HTML/XHTML Document Elements; 3.7 The Document Header; 3.8 The Document Body; 3.9 Editorial Markup; 3.10 The
Tag; Chapter 4: Text Basics; 4.1 Divisions and Paragraphs; 4.2 Headings; 4.3 Changing Text Appearance and Meaning; 4.4 Content-Based Style Tags; 4.5 Physical Style Tags; 4.6 Precise Spacing and Layout; 4.7 Block Quotes; 4.8 Addresses; 4.9 Special Character Encoding; 4.10 HTML's Obsolete Expanded Font Handling; Chapter 5: Rules, Images, and Multimedia; 5.1 Horizontal Rules; 5.2 Inserting Images in Your Documents; 5.3 Document Colors and Background Images; 5.4 Background Audio; 5.5 Animated Text; 5.6 Other Multimedia Content; Chapter 6: Links and Webs; 6.1 Hypertext Basics; 6.2 Referencing Documents: The URL; 6.3 Creating Hyperlinks; 6.4 Creating Effective Links; 6.5 Mouse-Sensitive Images; 6.6 Creating Searchable Documents; 6.7 Relationships; 6.8 Supporting Document Automation; Chapter 7: Formatted Lists; 7.1 Unordered Lists; 7.2 Ordered Lists; 7.3 The Tag; 7.4 Nesting Lists; 7.5 Definition Lists; 7.6 Appropriate List Usage; 7.7 Directory Lists; 7.8 Menu Lists; Chapter 8: Cascading Style Sheets; 8.1 The Elements of Styles; 8.2 Style Syntax; 8.3 Style Classes; 8.4 Style Properties; 8.5 Tagless Styles: The Tag; 8.6 Applying Styles to Documents; Chapter 9: Forms; 9.1 Form Fundamentals; 9.2 The