HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible

by Steven M. Schafer

The Barnes & Noble Review
Even in an era of slick web editors, you ll be far more successful if you thoroughly understand three core technologies: HTML, XHTML, and CSS. Sure, you needn t hand-code everything. But when something goes wrong, or you need a better way to do the job, where do you turn? We recommend HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible, Third Edition.

The Web has matured to the point where reliable best practices exist for building sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS. Brian Pfaffenberger focuses on those: not just what works, but what works best. (That s especially true in a closing section, which brings together high-level principles for developing structured, highly usable content that s easier to maintain and secure.)

Refer to this book for concise and accurate guidance on all the meat-and-potatoes tasks: text formatting, lists, images, links, special characters, tables, frames, forms, multimedia, CSS style rules, fonts, colors, backgrounds, element positioning, and much more. Also turn to it for up-to-date briefings on more advanced topics, from DHTML with CSS to XML, even database-driven web publishing. (All the examples are downloadable, from simple HTML text formatting to MySQL database queries.)

There s a full section on testing, publishing, and maintaining sites: everything from validating documents to choosing service providers, even site publicity. (And, at the back, complete references to HTML tags, CSS conventions, and language codes.)

As comprehensive as ever, this Third Edition eliminates some failed technologies and adds some important new ones -- notably, blogging and content management tools. You ll rely on it constantly, for years to come.
Bill Camarda

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2003 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.

792 pages, Paperback

First published November 11, 2004