Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference

Description

Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference (Beginning: from Novice to Professional)

By David Schultz, Craig Cook,

Publisher: Apress
Number Of Pages: 430
Publication Date: 2007-06-25
Sales Rank: 129290
ISBN / ASIN: 1590597478
EAN: 9781590597477
Binding: Paperback
Manufacturer: Apress
Studio: Apress
Average Rating: 4

If you want to get into developing web sites, the most important thing you need is a solid understanding of Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML¡ªthe language that the majority of web site content is written in.

Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference incorporates practical examples that will show you how to structure your data correctly using (X)HTML, along with styling and layout basics using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). You'll also learn how to add dynamic behavior to your data using the JavaScript™ language.

This book is forward-thinking because all the featured code and techniques are standards compliant and demonstrate best practices¡ªso you won't waste time on outdated, bad techniques. Your web pages will work properly in most web browsers and be accessible to web users with disabilities, easily locatable with popular search engines, and compact in file size.

Even if you already know HTML and CSS basics, this book will still be useful to you. It features comprehensive reference tables at the back, so you can look up all of the troublesome attributes, codes, and properties quickly and easily.

Pick up a copy of this book because it:

Teaches standards-compliant HTML--not outdated techniques
Includes reference sections for you to easily look up syntax
Doesn't require previous programming experience for comprehension
Bruce Lawson and Gez Lemon acted as technical reviewers of Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML. Bruce and Gez are active members of the Web Standards Project's Accessibility Task Force, and have helped ensure that the book follows current guidelines and best practice.

Review:
Building a strong foundation with HTML

Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference by David Schultz and Craig Cook is an excellent beginners introduction to HTML and CSS. Through each of the eleven chapters the authors walk through the basics and foundation of HTML. For those who are just treading in the waters of HTML and CSS, this book will help you understand the tools available to you as you craft your markup. You will learn about the tags available, their available attributes and purposes, and how to finely tune these into a semantic layout that ultimately gives your content more meaning.

Chapter 1 is our quick history lesson and introduction to HTML. They give background and insight into the goals and purposes of HTML, and how these were shifted during the browser wars and the battle for browser dominance and market share. They introduce the different versions of HTML available, and what they mean for your markup and the rendering inside of the browser. As CSS is discussed, there is also a discussion on keeping a clean separation of content and presentation. Chapter 1 lets us see the big picture and evolution of HTML.

Chapter 2 builds the foundation for the rest of the chapters. This chapter discusses the basics of XHTML and CSS. The building blocks discussed here will be addressed in each and every subsequent chapter of the book. Things such as tags, elements, attributes, and formatting. We are also given a snapshot view of what comprises an XHTML document, the doctype, the HTML element, and the document tree. All of this plays into understanding the fundamentals of CSS, cascade, and inheritance. We now have our history lesson and basic constructs in place, it's time to take a look at the rest of the pieces to the puzzle.

Chapters 3 and 4 cover a large territory. From constructing a useable head section, to walking step by step through many of the available HTML elements available to you as you put your content together. With discussion of each element, you are given detailed instructions of how and when it should be used, with an exhaustive list of its available attributes. CSS is briefly discussed, but will be re-introduced in a later chapter after we have our content constructed.

Chapter 5 is all about images. This chapter gives a brief primer on how digital images work, and what are the formats you can use within your content. Images can serve different purposes: icons, decoration, background, or context. Each of these are discussed with information on how to place them accordingly with CSS or the img tag.

Chapter 6 is all about linking. You are introduced to the a tag, its available attributes, and how you can create different types of links. Textual links, anchor links, and linking an image are all discussed.

Chapter 7 is all about tables. Despite what you may hear from others, tables have a very good semantic use in regards to tabular data (who would have thought?). However, tables are also misunderstood in relation to the tags and attributes. It is important to build tables with accessibility in mind, and this chapter goes over some of the elements that haven't received as much exposure. These include, but are not limited to: caption, colgroup, and tbody. This chapter will give you the information necessary to build a powerful and semantically rich table.

Chapter 8 discusses all of the little details to building a usable and accessible form. Just as with tables, there are some elements that are often forgotten about when building forms. This chapter does a great job of covering all of the necessary components for a form, and how to structure them. Form elements are rendered with the underlying operating system, so the end of this chapter discusses CSS and some of the ways you can spruce up the look of your forms. This is to be used with caution, as forms are rendered differently in each browser.

Chapters 9 and 10 discuss the other 2 pieces of the trinity of the front end: CSS and JavaScript. These chapters are meant to be brief primers, and will most likely whet your appetite to learn more about each aspect. They are also placed here to give you a good foundation as the final chapter will roll everything up into a case study.

Chapter 11 is the end of the journey. What good would the book be if you couldn't put what you have learned into practice? This chapter creates the fictional Spaghetti & Cruft website (you have to read the book to find out the meaning of the name). This chapter starts with the design process, moves to the building process, and then polishes it off by adding enhancements with CSS and JavaScript. The humorous name aside, this chapter is one of the most valuable chapters of the entire book. This final chapter brings the book to a close, and with it leaves you a solid foundation as you continue your journey of building other sites.

Conclusion
Many would argue that they don't need to learn HTML, that is what a WYSIWYG is for. This book shows you the value of understanding the history, the basics, and the semantics of HTML. It is important to note that nothing found in this book is earth-shattering, however, if you are a beginner and new to HTML, this book will give you the proper start you need to begin developing right away. If you are moving away from the reliance of a WYSIWYG, you may be surprised at many of the elements available to you that are covered in this book.

Review:
Horrifically inappropriate for a true beginner

Despite the "Beginning HTML" in the title, this small horror is a densely packed text of incomprehensible jargon.

This book is only useful for balancing wobbly table legs and for teaching writers how NOT to write a reference work / tutorial.

I bought it based on the title, not the contents. (It was shrink-wrapped at a brick-and-mortar bookstore) Had I seen a sample of the text, I would have reshelved it hurriedly or offered a dime to buy it for firewood.

As a reference work for web designers, or a tutorial for beginners, it ranks below any other book I've seen on the subject.

APPENDICES:
1) The promised CSS is scattered throughout the book, with no CSS reference guide in the appendices.
2) The appendices for HTML and XHTML describe each tag's parameters in such a way as to leave one wondering how to use them, and what each tag and parameter does.

EXAMPLES:
The authors clearly did not proofread the version that reached the printers, or the editors made unexpected, inexcusable last-minute cutbacks. This is most obvious in photo captions that ask us (unbelievably) to find the differently colored text in identical B&W screenshots (p. 143), and in examples of JPEG artifacts/compression (p. 108) and pixelating (p. 106) that are unnoticeable because the example photographs have been shrunken far too much or carelessly created.

INDEX:
Carelessly assembled, neglecting common terms like "mouseover".
LANGUAGE:
Professorial pointification and obfuscation rather than real advice to beginners or helpful reference for experts. Reads like a fillibuster performed by a student defending his masters' dissertation.
For example, what beginner could make use of this entry in the appendices?
(p. 353)
"The param element allows you to set run-time values for objects that have been inserted into a document. Required attributes: type: specifies the MIME type of the resource specified in the value attribute when the valuetype attribute is set to ref; value: specifies the actual value associated with the parameter"
...and so on.

Sentences are needlessly wordy, overly technical, and filled with passive verbs. In short, the writing bores and frustrates more than an afternoon spent with an enthusiastic life insurance salesman.

For example, from page 352: : "disabled": Sets the control as "disabled"; "value": Specifies the value for the option that will be sent to the server.
Why would anyone whose first language is English say "as" instead of "to"? What writer uses a word ("disabled") in the same word's definition? What "control" are the authors talking about? Why was ink so valuable that the authors couldn't give examples these options in use? What are the possible values for "value"?

Buy this book only if your goal is to frighten a web designer's boss away from learning what the designer does for a living....or if you need something slim yet heavy for flinging at life insurance salesmen.

Review:
Good for this relative beginner

I ordered this book along with Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. I was worried based on reviews that this might be a little over my head. My only program experience is with VBA macro writing. I wanted Head First's book to protect myself from getting lost.

What I found is there was no problem understanding this well-presented and clear text. In fact, I much prefer it to the "dummy downed" Head First book. Had I to do it over, this would have been my only purchase.

Review:
Concise and with good examples

Found this book to be a concise guide to learning html, css, and xhtml conforming to the latest standards. I had dabbled with web pages before, and though I could eventually hack something together, I knew it wasn't the way the pros did it. This book provided a good conceptual framework on how to separate presentation from content, the key reason to use CSS.

Review:
An excellent primer into the world of the web developer

As a hard-core software engineer who builds browser-based applications for a living, I often find myself appalled at my lack of knowledge of the inner workings of the code that my software dynamically creates, HTML.

This book gave me a better understanding of some of the areas I was really interested in, like web-standards compliance, XHTML and the proper use of doc-types.

Highly recommended for both beginners (my teenage kids are using it to jazz-up their myspace pages!) and old-hacks like me.

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