HTML is changing so fast it's almost impossible to keep up with developments. XHTML is HTML 4.0 rewritten in XML; it provides the precision of XML while retaining the flexibility of HTML. HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition, brings it all together. It's the most comprehensive book available on HTML and XHTML today. It covers Netscape Navigator 6.0, Internet Explorer 5.0, HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, JavaScript, Style sheets, Layers, and all of the features supported by the popular web browsers. Learning HTML and XHTML is like learning any new language, computer or human. Most students first immerse themselves in examples. Studying others is a natural way to learn, making learning easy and fun. Imitation can take learning only so far, though. It's as easy to learn bad habits through imitation as it is to acquire good ones. The better way to become HTML-fluent is through a comprehensive reference that covers the language syntax, semantics, and variations in detail and demonstrates the difference between good and bad usage. HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition, helps in both ways: the authors cover every element of HTML/XHTML in detail, explaining how each element works and how it interacts with other elements. Many hints about HTML/XHTML style smooth the way for writing documents that range from simple online documentation to complex presentations. With hundreds of examples, the book gives web authors models for writing their own effective web pages and for mastering advanced features, like style sheets and frames. HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition, shows how to:

• Implement the XHTML 1.0 standard and prepare web pages for the transition to XML browsers

• Use style sheets and layers to control a document's appearance

• Create tables, from simple to complex

• Use frames to coordinate sets of documents

• Design and build interactive forms and dynamic documents

• Insert images, sound files, video, Java applets, and JavaScript programs

• Create documents that look good on a variety of browsers

The book comes with a handy quick reference card listing HTML tags.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 152 Ratings

If you touch HTML in any way, this book is worth your time and money - 2009-06-23
Reviewer Rating:
I learned HTML in 1994 from a two-page web tutorial - and back then, that was pretty much all there was to know. Well, HTML itself has changed quite a bit in the past 15 years, and I finally decided to break down and take a crack at seriously learning all the new stuff (to me, "div"s and "iframe"s were new). Overall, I'm glad I decide to learn from the O'Reilly book (of course, O'Reilly's never steered me wrong).

Clearly, it would be impossible to fill a 632-page book with _just_ HTML (and XHTML), so the authors digress (fortunately) into several related, although not-strictly-HTML topics such as image formats, URL formats, CSS and Javascript. The placement and organization of this "extra" material was perfect, with forward-references mentioned explicitly throughout when appropriate.

Although this is more of a technical reference than a "Master Web Design!" type of book, the authors do go into a bit of general web design philosophy, especially in chapter 6 (which mostly covers links). This clearly isn't aimed at experienced programmers per se (although one will get quite a bit of useful information from it); the only real reference to programming at all is the last six pages of chapter 9, which talks (briefly) about form processing. In chapter 12, when they talk about java applets, they state "Creating Java applets is a programming task, not usually a job for the HTML or XHTML author", if you wanted more evidence that their audience is web page designers rather than programmers.

This book tries to serve as both tutorial and reference, so a lot of sections end up being repeated - for example, each time a new tag is introduced, a paragraph describing the "dir" and "lang" attributes (which apply to every HTML tag) is repeated, for the benefit of somebody who just opened the book to the section on, say, the "div" tag. This gets to be a bit tedious, as I kept having to re-read the same paragraphs several times just to make sure nothing new had been hidden in there. In some cases, there were - in chapter 7, they start adding the disclaimer "not all [of these] are implemented by the currently popular browsers for this tag or for many others" - but they don't (!) specify which popular browsers or which tags.

Most of the book is about HTML, saving XHTML for the very end. The code samples in the book are very much HTML, not XHTML - "br" and "hr" tags are presented without closing slashes, they don't insert closing tags for "p", "td", and "tr" tags, and many attribute value are given without being surrounded by quotes, for example. Chapter 16, which covers the specific differences between XHTML and HTML, clarifies this - in fact, they state that some browsers can be confused by closing slashes on "br" and "hr" tags.

They cover, of course, every feature of HTML, past or present (at least up to HTML 4.0, the current version). As such, they talk about a lot of "sometimes-used" features - some things that have been deprecated but are still "in wide use" or some features that have been added but "have not been embraced", for example, but there's no data at all about frequency of use. It would have been nice to see some research on how widespread certain tags or certain attributes are in actual use.

There are a handful of curious omissions, too - they mention that the "link" tag accepts the "media" attribute, but don't specify what it would contain or why you'd use it (looking at examples, it appears to be identical to the "media" attribute of the "style" tag). They don't mention the common '' idiom in Javascript-enabled pages.

The chapter on CSS was worth the price of the book - it wasn't exhaustive (they didn't cover every part of the CSS specification, much less the popular but undocumented extensions, like they did with HTML), but it covered the important parts extremely well.

Javascript is mentioned, but just barely (although I did learn a couple of things I didn't know). The book dedicates 14 pages to javascript, and six of these cover javascript style sheets, which no current browser supports. Although the coverage of CSS was excellent, Javascript is treated mostly as a footnote.

All in all, I'd recommend this book for anybody with anything more than a passing interest in HTML, regardless of skill level - there's something in here for everybody, and if you touch HTML in any way in your profession, you're going to learn something useful here.

Beware of the Edition - 2009-06-04
Reviewer Rating:
Amazon is mixing reviews from different editions of this book. It's a fine book, but editions 5 and older are certainly dated. While most of the information in the 5th edition may be factually correct, there's a confusing mix of deprecated (obsolete) and standard features - plus many references to outdated browsers. If you're trying to write compliant XHTML buy the latest edition or look for another more recent book.

Happy with it. - 2009-09-27
Reviewer Rating:
I have purchased many O'Reily books in the past and have been very happy with them. In fact, I will purchase an O'Reily book above all others unless there is a bad review. Maybe I am just a OBC type person. Anyways, so far the book seems good as a reference, well laid out, comprehensive.

HTML complete guide - 2009-09-26
Reviewer Rating:
If you are interested in learning HTML, or CSS, this is a great book to learn from, well worth the read, very informative, and written to understand.

Good desk reference - 2009-08-27
Reviewer Rating:
Since my mind is cluttered with 40 years-worth of programming languages, and I'm going between Java, JavaScript, XML, XSL, HTML, and CSS constantly, I need something to grab and lookup those things I may be unsure of. This book does the trick nicely.

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