[aclug-L] Re: HTML Documentation

[Nate Bargmann <ka0rny@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Perhaps I just like the style, so I would recommend O'Reilly's "HTML
The Definitive Guide."  The copy I have is the Third Edition, printed
in August of 1998.

It starts out assuming one has zero knowledge of HTML and works your
way through the structure of a page to the common text elements on
toward images and multimedia, document layout, links, lists, forms,
tables, frames and executable content.  About 45 pages are devoted
to Cascading Style Sheets alone.  The book also covers dynamic 
documents and executable content, although I haven't read those 
chapters yet as they don't apply to what I'm doing.  It isn't 
operating system specific and assumes you will be writing your HTML 
files in an ASCII text editor.

A very good feature of the book is that it stresses the elements
that are part of the HTML 4.0 standard maintained by W3C.org
(http://www.w3c.org) and also covers elements supported by Netscape
4.x and IE 4.x.  It stresses content-based style tags (i.e. <strong>
</strong>) over physical style tags (i.e. <b> </b>) and warns of
the possible differences between browsers when using most tags.

All in all, I like this book.  It is written in a conversational
tone and, although it doesn't have exercises at the end of each
chapter, it does offer quite a number of useful examples that
can be tried as the text is read and serve as a useful reference
later on.  I would have liked to have seen more css examples as some 
were a bit vague, but until we get some standards compliant browsers, 
I'm afraid css will remain off to the side.  Quite a bit of the text 
is spent describing the differences of content layout between NS and IE.  
While that may seem like overkill, it is useful if you're trying to write
complex pages that look similar in each browser without resorting
to browser specific markup.  A reference card with a quick summary
of the HTML elements and their attributes is bound into the book.
No CD or software is included.

I would have liked a bit deeper coverage of css, but I guess since
they had no browsers at the time giving good css rendering, they were 
limited as to the examples they could provide.

HTML The Definitive Guide, Third Edition,  by Chuck Musciano and 
Bill Kennedy, 585 pages, published by O'Reilly and Associates, 
August 1998.  Cover price $32.95

- Nate >>

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