HTML, XHTML, & CSS, Sixth Edition: Visual QuickStart Guide

i. The World Wide Web is the Gutenberg press of our time. Just about anyone can create their own Web site and then present it to the Internet public. Some Web pages belong to businesses with services to sell, others to...

1. Web Page Building Blocks While Web pages have become increasingly complex, their underlying structure remains remarkably simple. A Web page is made up of three principal components: text content, the actual headers a...

2. Working with Web Page Files Before you start writing (X)HTML elements and attributes, it's important to know how to create the files in which you'll use such code. In this chapter, you'll learn how to create, edit, a...

3. Basic (X)HTML Structure This chapter covers the most basic (X)HTML elementsthe ones you need to create the structure of your document. You'll learn how to create new paragraphs, headers, page breaks, comments, and mo...

4. Basic (X)HTML Formatting While it's a good idea to try to separate formatting from content and to use style sheets for controlling the appearance of your page, there are a few simple ways to format text in (X)HTML th...

5. IMAGES Creating images for the Web is a bit different from creating images for output on paper. Although the basic characteristics of Web images and printable images are the same, six main factors distinguish them: f...

6. Links Links are the distinguishing feature of the World Wide Web. They let you skip from one page to another, call up a movie or a recording of The Nields (or your favorite band), and download files with FTP. A link...

7. Style Sheet Building Blocks While (X)HTML gives your Web pages their basic structure, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) defines their appearance. A style sheet is simply a text file that contains one or more rules that d...

8. Working with Style Sheet Files Before you start defining your style sheets, it's important to know how to create and use the files that will contain them. In this chapter, you'll learn how to create a style sheet fil...

9. Defining Selectors As you saw in Constructing a Style Rule on page 120, there are two principal parts of a CSS style rule. The selector determines which elements the formatting will be applied to and the declarations...

10. Formatting with Styles As we saw in Chapter 4, Basic (X)HTML Formatting, (X)HTML has a rather limited repertoire of text formatting options. Thankfully, CSS offers many more possibilities. With CSS, you can change...

11. Layout with Styles There are two principal methods for laying out Web pages: CSS and tables (which we'll discuss in Chapter 16). Using CSS has several advantages. First, CSS is good for creating liquid layouts that...

12. Dynamic Effects with Styles There are a few CSS features that lend themselves to creating dynamic effects. These are the display and visibility properties, and the :hover pseudo-class. While the display and visibili...

13. Style Sheets For Handhelds A last minute decision to go to the movies, a need to settle a bet about the official language of Andorra, the phone number of the company to which you'll arrive fifteen minutes late for y...

14. Style Sheets for Printing CSS lets you create specialized style sheets that control how Web pages are printed. These need not be anything like the screen version of the style sheets for that page. For example, you m...

15. Lists The (X)HTML specifications contain special codes for creating lists of items. You can create plain, numbered, or bulleted lists, as well as lists of definitions. You can also nest one kind of list inside anoth...

16. Tables Tables have a storied history on the Web. While originally conceived just to hold tabular data, they were quickly appropriated for a much bigger task: serving as the foundation for complicated layouts, with m...

17. Forms Up to now, all the (X)HTML you have learned has helped you communicate your ideas with your visitors. In this chapter, you'll learn how to create forms which enable your visitors to communicate with you. Ther...

18. Video, Audio, and Other Multimedia One of the things that has made the Web so popular is the fact that you can add graphics, sound, animations, and movies to your Web pages. While in the past the prohibitive size of...

19. Scripts Scripts are little programs that add interactivity to your page. You can write simple scripts to add an alert box or a bit of text to your page, or more complicated scripts that create rollovers or load part...

20. A Taste Of Javascript Many of the most popular effects created on Web pages these days have little or nothing to do with (X)HTML and everything to do with JavaScript, a scripting language originally developed by Net...

21. Symbols And Non-English Characters Global Reach (http://www.glreach.com/globstats/) estimates that only 35% of the Web surfing public speaks English. That means that roughly 65% hopes that your Web page is written i...

22. Testing and Debugging Web Pages So, you've written up a brand new page and you fire up your browser only to find that it doesn't look anything like you expected. Or it doesn't display at all. Or maybe it looks great...

23. Publishing Your Pages on the Web Once you've finished your masterpiece and are ready to present it to the public, you have to transfer your pages to your Web host server so that people can get to them. You may also...

24. Getting People to Visit With billions of Web pages in existence and thousands more being created every day, you may have to shout a little to get your page noticed. This chapter explains the (X)HTML tags you can use...

25. Syndication and Podcasting When you make changes to your site, it's nice to have people notice. Although mass emailings might do the trick, they also might alienate your visitors. Instead, you can publish a summary...