World Wide Web

This is a good reference book for using HTML and XHTML. Unfortunately, the book is a little dated in its reference to old web browsers. And the authors have an unfortunate distaste for XHTML. In my opinion, it’s time for a new edition.

The book’s chapters are:

1. HTML, XHTML, and the World Wide Web
2. Quick start
3. Anatomy of an HTML document
4. Text basics
5. Rules, images, and multimedia
6. Links and webs
7. Formatted lists
8. Cascading style sheets
9. Forms
10. Tables
11. Frames
12. Executable content
13. Dynamic documents
14. Netscape layout extensions
15. XML
16. XHTML
17. Tips, tricks, and hacks

Although cascading style sheets are a big improvement over the older tag-based formatting of web documents, CSS is a failure in terms of ease of use. Simple things, like centering or creating two-column layouts, are unnecessarily difficult. This book goes a long way towards explaining how to do things, but it badly needs a section on simple methods. You must buy other books by Eric A. Meyer to learn these.

The book’s chapters are:

1. CSS and documents
2. Selectors
3. Structure and the cascade
4. Values and units
5. Fonts
6. Text properties
7. Basic visual formatting
8. Padding, borders, and margins
9. Colors and backgrounds
10. Floating and positioning
11. Table layout
12. Lists and generated content
13. User interface styles
14. Non-screen media