About the Book
The World Wide Web has come a long way in a relatively short period of time. Since its debut in the early 1990s, the web has quickly evolved from an esoteric collection of academic papers into a fully fledged and pervasive medium, an equal to print, radio, and television. The web is a vast repository of information on every subject imaginable, from astrophysics and ancient philosophy to the care and feeding of hermit crabs. It has become an integral part of many people’s daily lives and is the platform for many aspects of modern business and commerce. But at its heart, the web is still just a way to share documents.
This book will show you how to create documents of your own so you can share them on the web. You’ll become intimately familiar with the rules and constructs of HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the computer language the web is built on. It’s a simple language, and the basic rules are easy to pick up and put to use. HTML is a tool, and once you know how to use it, you’re limited only by your imagination.
Not very long ago, parts of HTML were frequently misused, and the rules were largely ignored — because we had no other choice or simply didn’t know any better. But the web has matured a lot in the last few years, and we’ve since learned that sometimes following the rules really is the best approach. Unfortunately, many of the outdated methods that came about during the web’s unruly, rebellious youth are still in common practice today. This book will help you avoid the mistakes of the past and build a better web for the future. You’ll learn how to use HTML effectively and responsibly and to make your web documents clean, meaningful, and accessible to as many people and devices as possible.
If you’ve been around the web for a little while, you’ve likely heard about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and you may be curious about just what they are. In a nutshell, CSS is a language that describes how web documents should be visually presented. It’s very powerful and flexible and is also pretty dang cool. However, CSS is a rich, complex language in its own right, and we can’t possibly cover every facet of it alongside all the other information contained in this book. But as you’ll quickly discover, CSS is directly connected to HTML, and you’ll first need to understand markup before you can put CSS to good use. This book will introduce you to CSS and offer many practical examples of how you can use it. We’ll give you the solid grounding in HTML you’ll need as a starting point to delve deeper into the art and craft of designing web pages with CSS.
Who This Book Is For
This book is for anyone interested in learning how to build web pages from the ground up using modern best practices. We assume you’re familiar with the Internet and the World Wide Web, and you probably wouldn’t pick up a book with “HTML” in the title unless you’d at least heard of it. Beyond that, we don’t assume any prior knowledge of web design or computer programming. As you advance through the book, the topics get a little more advanced as well. But fear not: this is a book for beginners, and we’ll walk you through the tough parts.
Even if you’re not a beginner, the book may be well worth a read. Only a few short years ago, the common approach to building web pages was very different from how things are done today. A lot has changed in recent times, so if you’re a more experienced web developer looking to get back to basics and see what all this “semantic XHTML and CSS” mumbo-jumbo is about, this is the book for you.