"...lucid, in-depth descriptions of the behavior of every HTML tag on every major browser and platform, plus enough dry humor to make the book a pleasure to read." --Edward Mendelson, PC Magazine

"When they say 'definitive' they're not kidding." --Linda Roeder, About.com

Put everthing you need to know about HTML & XHTML at your fingertips. For nearly a decade, hundreds of thousands of web developers have turned to HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide to master standards-based web development. Truly a definitive guide, the book combines a unique balance of tutorial material with a comprehensive reference that even the most experienced web professionals keep close at hand. From basic syntax and semantics to guidelines aimed at helping you develop your own distinctive style, this classic is all you need to become fluent in the language of web design.

The new sixth edition guides you through every element of HTML and XHTML in detail, explaining how each element works and how it interacts with other elements. You'll also find detailed discussions of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which is intricately related to web page development. The most all-inclusive, up-to-date book on these languages available, this edition covers HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, and CSS2, with a preview of the upcoming XHTML2 and CSS3. Other topics include the newer initiatives in XHTML (XForms, XFrames, and modularization) and the essentials of XML for advanced readers. You'll learn how to:

• Use style sheets to control your document's appearance

• Work with programmatically generated HTML

• Create tables, both simple and 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 authors apply a natural learning approach that uses straightforward language and plenty of examples. Throughout the book, they offer suggestions for style and composition to help you decide how to best use HTML and XHTML to accomplish a variety of tasks. You'll learn what works and what doesn't, and what makes sense to those who view your web pages and what might be confusing. Written for anyone who wants to learn the language of the Web--from casual users to the full-time design professionals--this is the single most important book on HTML and XHTML you can own.

Bill Kennedy is chief technical officer of MobileRobots, Inc. When not hacking new HTML pages or writing about them, "Dr. Bill" (Ph.D. in biophysics from Loyola University of Chicago) is out promoting the company's line of mobile, autonomous robots that can be used for artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic research, and education.

Chuck Musciano began his career as a compiler writer and crafter of tools at Harris Corporations' Advanced Technology Group and is now a manager of Unix Systems in Harris' Corporate Data Center.

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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