It's important for anyone who creates Web sites--even those who rely on powerful editors like Dreamweaver or GoLive--to know HTML. The World Wide Web Consortium rewrote HTML as a subset of XML (dubbing it "XHTML 1.0") and the allowable code will eventually be stricter. Tags that are being phased out are labeled "deprecated"--current browsers can still handle them, but if you want your site to keep up with future browsers, not to mention conform to accessibility requirements, you will want to get on top of XHTML.

Of course, Elizabeth Castro manages to write books that not only speak to those who are already fluent in HTML, but are good for newbies too. She makes it a breeze to create sites that are visually stylish and technically sophisticated without the expense of buying an editor.

Among the topics covered in her new book, HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS: using the (relatively newer) structural tags (like doctype and div); correctly using older tags (like p and img) that have been modified in XHTML; writing XHTML so that formatting is done by the style sheets; writing those style sheets (cascading style sheets, a.k.a. "CSS"); creating a variety of layouts; and dealing with tables, frames, forms, multimedia, a bit of JavaScript (including mouseovers), WML (for mobile device displays), debugging, publishing, and publicizing your site.

As with all Visual QuickStart Guides, this one features clear and concise instructions side by side with well-captioned illustrations and screen shots that show both the source code and the resulting effect on the Web page. The index is extremely detailed, making this a great reference.

Also great for reference are the outstanding appendices. The first is an extensive list of tags and attributes, indicating which are deprecated and/or proprietary and on which page they are discussed. A similar appendix shows CSS properties and values; given the future of Web coding, this chart alone is worth the price of the book. Other handy charts cover intrinsic events, symbols and character Unicodes, and an expanded color chart that goes way beyond the virtually archaic Web-safe palette. All of which makes this a definite must-have for every Web designer's bookshelf. --Angelynn Grant


From Library Journal
Peachpit's "Visual Quickstart" guides are real meat-and-potatoes works for beginners. Nothing fancy to be found here, just one annotated screen shot after another. An advanced user will finish one of these books during a two-hour airplane ride; beginners will need a day. But everyone will welcome the purely practical approach.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Book News, Inc.
This guide explains how to code HTML and create efficient web pages through series of step-by-step instructions accompanied by screenshots. It covers text formatting, page layout, creating links, applying styles, and adding tables and forms. The fifth edition cites the stricter XHTML syntax and adds a chapter on web pages for mobile devices.Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR


Book Description
As both the Web and the browsers used to navigate it mature, work-arounds that compensate for the myriad factors that affect Web page appearance no longer cut it. Users expect Web pages to look beautiful regardless--and with the Fifth Edition of this popular Visual QuickStart Guide, you can make your Web pages comply. By following the generously illustrated, step-by-step instructions that are the hallmark of the Visual QuickStart series, you'll create beautiful code that works consistently across browser versions and platforms (including hand-held devices and cell phones) in no time. This updated edition includes a new section on foreign-language and multilingual Web sites as well as ample coverage on how the use of HTML is changing. What hasn't changed, however, is the book's popular format: Task-oriented, step-by-step instruction that builds on your growing knowledge. Info-packed appendixes, a comprehensive index, and plenty of screen shots and code examples make HTML for the World Wide Web, Fifth Edition, with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide a must-have reference. Whether you're just getting your feet wet (no prior HTML knowledge is required) or design Web sites for a living, you'll turn to this best-selling guide again and again for answers to all of your HTML-related questions.


Card catalog description
"Takes an easy, visual approach to teaching HTML, using pictures to guide you through the software and show you what to do; works like a reference book - you look up what you need and then get straight to work; no long-winded passages - concise, straightforward commentary explains what you need to know; and companion Web site gives you all the book's example files, a lively question-and-answer area, updates, and more."--BOOK JACKET.


From the Back Cover
As both the Web and the browsers used to navigate it mature, work-arounds that compensate for the myriad factors that affect Web page appearance no longer cut it. Users expect Web pages to look beautiful regardless--and with the Fifth Edition of this popular Visual QuickStart Guide, you can make your Web pages comply. By following the generously illustrated, step-by-step instructions that are the hallmark of the Visual QuickStart series, you'll create beautiful code that works consistently across browser versions and platforms (including hand-held devices and cell phones) in no time. This updated edition includes a new section on foreign-language and multilingual Web sites as well as ample coverage on how the use of HTML is changing. What hasn't changed, however, is the book's popular format: Task-oriented, step-by-step instruction that builds on your growing knowledge. Info-packed appendixes, a comprehensive index, and plenty of screen shots and code examples make HTML for the World Wide Web, Fifth Edition, with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide a must-have reference. Whether you're just getting your feet wet (no prior HTML knowledge is required) or design Web sites for a living, you'll turn to this best-selling guide again and again for answers to all of your HTML-related questions.


About the Author
Elizabeth Castro has written numerous books, including the best-selling Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, XML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, and the four previous editions of this best-selling title.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
The Web￯﾿ﾽs grown up. So has its browsers, which increasingly sport version numbers like 6 and 7. So have its users, who will no longer settle for lousy navigation, cruddy layouts, or pages that just don￯﾿ﾽt look right.

So do your HTML right. Learn what works in today￯﾿ﾽs more mature browsers (CSS, especially, comes to mind) -- and take full advantage of it. Rely on your spiffy web layout software, sure, but never blindly. Get yourself some help.

Get yourself HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS Visual QuickStart Guide. It￯﾿ﾽs the easiest HTML book we￯﾿ﾽve seen that still manages to be comprehensive, and to stay firmly grounded in the reality of today￯﾿ﾽs demanding users and complex browsers. (Check out the price: it￯﾿ﾽs also one heck of a value.)

The book￯﾿ﾽs intelligence, clarity, and friendliness can be traced to its author, Elizabeth Castro. (If, as we expect, you like her style, you can stretch your skills later with her Visual QuickStart Guides on Perl and CGI, and on XML).

The book￯﾿ﾽs careful task-based organization, step-by-step instructions, clean design, and zillions of tips and screen captures are, of course, common to all Peachpit￯﾿ﾽs Visual QuickStart Guides. (By now you probably know how easy these books are to learn from; if you don￯﾿ﾽt, you￯﾿ﾽre missing a good bet.)

Virtually every page or two in this book introduces a new task. And virtually every task includes both sample HTML code and an illustration of what that code will look like in a contemporary browser -- a great starting point for experimentation.

As Castro observes, no matter how complex web pages get, a remarkably simple structure still lies underneath: text content, references, markup, and (optionally) information about encoding and the version of markup being used (known in W3C lingo as the ￯﾿ﾽdoctype￯﾿ﾽ). Castro discusses each in turn -- and the relationships among them.

Along the way, she makes sense of stuff that can easily trip up beginners: whether to create symbols and foreign language characters with old-fashioned special character references or with Unicode; why all your filenames should be lowercase; and what you need to know first about the differences between HTML 4 and XHTML (they both use precisely the same elements, attributes, and values, but ￯﾿ﾽHTML [is] a laid-back don￯﾿ﾽt-sweat-the-details kind of person. Perhaps not quite as hard-working as XHTML, but much happier and at ease with herself. XHTML, on the other hand is downright uptight. Always vigilant, never taking a rest. Sure, she gets more done, but what a price!￯﾿ﾽ

Speaking of XHTML, this book covers XHTML extensively. The previous edition, now more than three years old, was published way too long ago for that.

Also for the first time, this book contains extensive coverage of CSS. If you￯﾿ﾽre still not using CSS1, you probably ought to be for most sites and applications. Castro recommends relying on it not only for formatting fonts and size but also for laying out your page￯﾿ﾽs elements. Implement your site with a separate CSS file containing layout instructions, and it￯﾿ﾽs easy to apply consistent changes site-wide. Try that with tables. Bonus: Your viewers get smaller, faster-loading pages.

Yes, we know￯﾿ﾽ ￯﾿ﾽNetscape 4.￯﾿ﾽ Well, according to Statmarket, all the Netscapes together are now down to 3.4 percent of the market -- and much of that is the CSS-compliant Netscape 6 and 7. More to the point, Castro offers a full chapter of strategies for accommodating old and buggy browsers while still gaining the benefits of CSS. (She also presents sample pages that work great in current browsers and degrade gracefully in ancient ones.)

Everything you need to learn (or remind yourself) about is covered here. Web images (making them float, stopping them from wrapping, aligning them, adding space around them). Links (targeting them to specific windows, creating keyboard shortcuts for links, working with image maps). Lists. Tables. Frames. Forms. Embedding multimedia and scripts. Testing and debugging. Password protected pages. Souped-up Mailto: links. Drop caps. Automatic slide shows. We￯﾿ﾽre out of space, and she￯﾿ﾽs only getting started. Bill Camarda

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.

ANNOTATION

This step-by-step guide on using Hypertext Markup Language to design pages for the Web presumes no prior knowledge of HTML, or even the Internet. It uses clear, concise instructions for creating each element of a Web page, and covers everything from titles and headers to complex tables and "clickable" graphics. 224 pp.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

As both the Web and the browsers used to navigate it mature, work-arounds that compensate for the myriad factors that affect Web page appearance no longer cut it. Users expect Web pages to look beautiful regardless -- and with the Fifth Edition of this popular Visual QuickStart Guide, you can make your Web pages comply. By following the generously illustrated, step-by-step instructions that are the hallmark of the Visual QuickStart series, you'll create beautiful code that works consistently across browser versions and platforms (including hand-held devices and cell phones) in no time.

This updated edition includes a new section on foreign-language and multilingual Web sites as well as ample coverage on how the use of HTML is changing. What hasn't changed, however, is the book's popular format: Task-oriented, step-by-step instruction that builds on your growing knowledge. Info-packed appendixes, a comprehensive index, and plenty of screen shots and code examples make HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide, Fifth Edition, a must-have reference. Whether you're just getting your feet wet (no prior HTML knowledge is required) or design Web sites for a living, you'll turn to this best-selling guide again and again for answers to all of your HTML-related questions.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews

This guide explains how to code HTML and create efficient web pages through series of step-by-step instructions accompanied by screenshots. It covers text formatting, page layout, creating links, applying styles, and adding tables and forms. The fifth edition cites the stricter XHTML syntax and adds a chapter on web pages for mobile devices. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Booknews

A tutorial for novices and a reference for experienced users, featuring step-by-step instruction, tips, troubleshooting advice, and a visual approach with screenshots and code examples. This fourth edition contains a new debugging chapter, expanded coverage of cascading style sheets, a new section on attracting visitors to a web page, and a set of CGI scripts for processing forms. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Internet Bookwatch

Elizabeth Castro's HTML For The World Wide Web appears in its 4th edition to provide a fine visual guide to the language. Beginners receive pictures rather than lots of text: all the basics are covered in an easily-accessed format.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

" If you're looking for a book on which to begin your HTML writing adventure, make this the one."--Post Gazette Magazine — John Robinson