January 01, 2002
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/html-4-for-the-world-wide-web/184413015

Rank: 1 - 3

Title: HTML 4 for the World Wide Web (336 pages) by Elizabeth Castro Publisher: Peachpit Press ISBN: 0-201-69696-7 Price: $17.95

As Web designers wrap their brains (not to mention keyboards and mice)around the HTML 4.0 specification, the debate on whether and when to incorporate Dynamic HTML, Cascading Style Sheets and other advanced features into Web sites, continues.

Elizabeth Castro's HTML 4 for the World Wide Web, (Peachpit Press) offers a complete guide to HTML 4 tags, with detailed examples of how to use them. The book is equally useful for both novice and experienced designers.

Despite the release of 4.0 browsers from Netscape and Microsoft (and recently the release of a 4.5 beta of Communicator from Netscape), many users are quite content with their 3.x browsers for now. As we all know, the 4.0 browsers require more RAM and take up a huge amount of drive space, so it goes without saying not everyone has made the switch just yet. Eventually, however, 4.0 browsers will attain a critical mass, and it will be necessary and advantageous to design pages with HTML 4.

HTML 4.0 is rich in capabilities, but at the same time, elegant and streamlined. HTML 4 requires Web designers to learn new tags and to work with them differently, as this version deprecates and replaces some older and popular tags. HTML 4 for the World Wide Web covers all tags from version 3.2 as well as the version 4 additions.

The book's chapters on text formatting, creating and using images, page layout, links, lists, tables, frames, and forms will get you up and running on every tag you will ever need to create a Web site. Each page contains between one and five separate screen shots alongside the text to illustrate exactly how the tags are used. With your text editor open, all you have to do is copy the examples in the book and tweak them for your own site.

Beginning hand-coders are likely to have this book open in front of them, as it is easy to find examples of page layouts and other elements. Experienced designers can always look up references for specific tags.

But this book isn't just about tags. Despite its brevity, HTML 4 for the World Wide Web offers many useful tips on Web design. For instance, the multimedia chapter not only tells you which tags will place audio on your page, but also how to create cross platform sound and the appropriate ways to use it. The chapters are organized such that they progress logically from simple to complex, so readers can learn on a need-to-know basis.

Three separate chapters cover different aspects of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). There are chapters on scripting, creative design, and publishing and promotion. The book is also thickened by detail about both Netscape and IE proprietary extensions.

The four-part appendix is an excellent resource for looking up tags -- both old and new. Also included in the appendices is information on visual design tools for authoring, graphics, imagemaps, and a listing of special symbols.

The HTML and Compatibility chart is especially useful in identifying which tags are native to which HTML version, and which ones are deprecated by HTML 4. Web designers should not be spooked by using deprecated tags, however, as new browsers will continue to support them (at least for now), and users who have older browsers will still be able to view them.

While the back cover of the book contains a hexadecimal color chart with more than 100 commonly used colors and their hex number equivalents, I wonder why Castro did not list all 216 browser-safe colors. This would have been far more useful. But that is the only flaw I found in this otherwise excellent new edition.

For a very reasonable price, HTML 4 for the World Wide Web is the only guide you need to create and publish Web sites. The author also maintains a Web site at http://www.cookwood.com/. Here, readers can communicate directly with her, submit URLs, and access additional tips and examples. Peachpit Press also maintains a companion site for the book at http://beta.peachpit.com/vqs/html4/.

Terms of Service | Privacy Statement | Copyright © 2024 UBM Tech, All rights reserved.