Month: December 2006

★★★★★ Build Your Own Web Site the Right Way Using HTML & CSS by Ian Lloyd (Sitepoint, 2006) is the first book I’ve reviewed here that closely mirrors my own attitude toward HTML and CSS. Naturally, I like the approach.

This is a very basic treatment. Some of the topics don’t get an in depth treatment, for example, CSS layouts. If the beginner basics are what you seek, then I certainly approve of the way Lloyd has gone about putting together his examples of HTML and CSS to get you there.

The book gets you going on building a web page by Chapter 2. Immediately following are two chapters on CSS, then the book explores the basics of images, tables, forms, and getting online. All of these chapters include standards-based examples and, of course, accessibility. Lloyd is, after all, the man behind the wonderful Accessify. There’s a chapter on using Blogger and one on finding free stuff that you can add to a site to make it more useful, for example, searches and blogrolls.

The XHTML Reference that serves as an appendix is interesting because it takes each HTML element, tells you what it does, what it can contain, what it may be contained in, and shows an example of the element in use.

And the most important question: could this book be used as the basis for a semester’s work? The answer is yes, if you are willing to supplement the thinly covered areas with more in-depth work you put together yourself.

★★★★ HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy (OReilly, 2007) is in its 6th edition. Oddly, for a person in my business, I’ve never held one of these particular Definitive Guides in my hand before now. I have other favorite resources, and I keep DTDs on my desktop, so I didn’t miss knowing what was in this reference book.

If you aren’t the kind of person who keeps DTDs on her desktop, you will find everything about HTML and XHTML in here. It describes every tag, DTD style, but it tells you much more than merely tag and attribute info. There is information about when and why you might want certain attributes and how to use elements effectively.

It’s written in such a way that you could actually read it straight through, but I consider it most useful as one of the references you grab as needed and open it first to the index to find the particular fact you seek. There are numerous well organized tables packed with tons of facts in a compact array. The chapter on Forms, for example, has a table of every form and input element, showing which form attributes are required, optional or not supported for each element or input type.

You couldn’t plan a semester, or even a lone lecture, using this book as your only resource, but you would certainly find many reasons to use it throughout the course of a semester. A recommended reference.