HTML, XHTML, & CSS Bible, 3rd Ed

Introduction

The World Wide Web has come a long way from its humble beginnings. Most Internet historians recognize Gopher as the precursor to the Web. Gopher was a revolutionary search tool that allowed the user to search hierarchical archives of textual documents. It enabled Internet users to easily search, retrieve, and share information.

Today’s World Wide Web is capable of delivering information via any number of medium—text, audio, video. The content can be dynamic and even interactive.

However, the Web is not a panacea. The standards that make up the HTTP protocol are implemented in different ways by different browsers. What works on one platform may not work the same, if at all, on the next. Newly Web-enabled devices— PDAs, cell phones, appliances, and so on—are still searching for a suitable form of HTML to standardize on.

This turmoil makes a book like this difficult to write. Although standards exist, they have been implemented in different ways and somewhat haphazardly. In addition, there are more technologies at work on the Web than can be easily counted. One book cannot hope to cover them all.

This book attempts to cover a broad subset of available technologies and techniques, centering on the HTML 4.01 standard, along with a mix of newer, upcoming standards such as XML and XHTML.
Who Should Read This Book?

This book is geared toward a wide audience. Those readers who are just getting started with HTML and Web content will benefit the most as this book provides a decent learning foundation as well as ample reference material for later perusal. Experienced users will find the chapters covering new standards and technologies to be the most useful, and will also appreciate having a comprehensive reference for consultation.

Although the Web is technical in nature, we have done our best to boil down the technology into simple and straightforward terms. Whether you are a computer scientist or a computer neophyte, you should be able to understand, adopt, and deploy the technologies discussed herein.
Book Organization, Conventions, and Features

The Wiley “Bible” series of books uses several different methods to present information to help you get the most out of it. The book is organized according to the following conventions.
Organization

This book is organized into logical parts. Each part contains related chapters that cover complementary subjects.

Part I, Understanding (X)HTML, is your introduction to the HTML protocol.

Part II, HTML and XHTML Authoring Fundamentals, continues coverage on the basics of the HTML protocol and familiarizes you with the basic HTML elements.

Part III, Controlling Presentation with CSS, covers Cascading Style Sheets—covering how CSS works and introducing its various elements.

Part IV, Advanced Web Authoring, delves into more advanced topics such as scripting, Dynamic HTML, and XML.

Part V, Testing, Publishing, and Maintaining Your Site, covers more details about the tools and methodology for creating and publishing your content to the Web.

Part VI, Principles of Professional Web Design and Development, covers more philosophical topics about developing structured, accessible content and how to protect your content online.

Part VII, Appendixes, provides reference material on HTML tags, CSS conventions, and language codes.

Conventions and features

There are many different organizational and typographical features throughout this book designed to help you get the most from the information.

Tips, Notes, and Cautions

Whenever the authors want to bring something important to your attention, the information will appear in a Tip, Note, or Caution. These elements are formatted like this:

Caution This information is important and is set off in a separate paragraph with a special icon. Cautions provide information about things to watch out for, whether these things are simply inconvenient or potentially hazardous to your data or systems.Tips generally are used to provide information that can make your work easier— special shortcuts or methods for doing something easier than the norm.

Notes provide additional, ancillary information that is helpful, but somewhat outside the current discussion.

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