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.

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.

I don't know why some people seem to think this book is good when it is relatively useless as a reference. The index is abysmal - for example, if you want to quickly see what a particular tag does it is a fishing expedition to simply find it. Try looking up "meta", for example - it's not in the index at all. Nor is anything about the various "headers" one can use. There is no entry in the index about "Location" headers, used to redirect to other URLs, for example.

These are just a couple examples of how sorry the index of this book is. I'm a programmer and just wanted something to use as a quick reference on my desk, not something to read cover-to-cover. It's just a markup language, people. Even if you're not a programmer and new to html I don't recommend this book unless you're suffering from insomnia. The authors go into far too much detail in some things and the book wanders around all over the place, plus someday you'll presumably figure out how the relatively simple markup languages work and want the book as a reference. Unfortunately when that day comes you'll be spending money on something else, even though this one claims to be a "definitive guide". It's not.

Like O'Reilly's Missing Manual series, the Definitie Guide series is great. This title HTML & XHTML is no exception. And, the animals are cute...

If you want to make your pages stand out more, this is the title for you. But, it takes some reading. It's a big book with lots of information. Don't be scared off with this information. Lots of pages means lots of stuff to read and consider.

O'Reilly is a great source for computer related learning. Don't put the possibilities aside...Try them..

A real educational experience. Also a well defined book. Be ready to learn when you read this book.