HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Chapter 1. HTML, XHTML, and the World Wide Web Though it began as a military experiment and spent its adolescence as a sandbox for academics and eccentrics, in less than a decade just before the new millennium, the worldwide network of co...

Chapter 2. Quick Start We didn't spend hours studiously poring over some reference book before we wrote our first HTML document. You probably shouldn't, either. HTML is simple to read and understand, and it's simple to write. And once you...

Chapter 3. Anatomy of an HTML Document Most HTML and XHTML documents are very simple, and writing one shouldn't intimidate even the most timid of computer users. First, although you might use a fancy WYSIWYG editor to help you compose it,...

Chapter 4. Text Basics Any successful presentation, even a thoughtful tome, should have its text organized into an attractive, effective document. Organizing text into attractive and effective documents is HTML and XHTML's forte. The lang...

Chapter 5. Rules, Images, and Multimedia While the body of most documents is text, an appropriate seasoning of horizontal rules, images, and other multimedia elements makes for a much more inviting and attractive document. These fea...

Chapter 6. Links and Webs Up to this point, we've dealt with HTML and XHTML documents as standalone entities, concentrating on the language elements you use for structure and to format your work. The true power of these markup languages,...

Chapter 7. Formatted Lists Making information more accessible is the single most important quality of HTML and its progeny, XHTML. The languages' excellent collection of text style and formatting tools help you organize your information i...

Chapter 8. Cascading Style Sheets Stylesheets are the way publishing professionals manage the overall "look" of their publicationsbackgrounds, fonts, colors, and so onfrom a single page to huge collections of documents. Most desktop publi...

Chapter 9. Forms Forms, forms, forms, forms: we fill 'em out for nearly everything, from the moment we're born, 'til the moment we die. Pretty mundane, really. So what's to explain all the hoopla and excitement over HTML forms? Simply...

Chapter 10. Tables Of all the extensions that found their way into HTML and XHTML, none is more welcome than tables. While tables are useful for the general display of tabular data, they also serve an important role in managing docu...

Chapter 11. Frames You can divide the browser's main display window into independent window frames, each simultaneously displaying a different documentsomething like a wall of monitors in a TV control room. Netscape invented the fea...

Chapter 12. Executable Content One of the most useful web technologies is the ability to deliver applications directly to the browser. These typically small programs perform simple tasks on the client computer, from responding to user mou...

Chapter 13. Dynamic Documents The standard HTML/XHTML document model is static. Once displayed on the browser, a document does not change until the user initiates some activity, such as selecting a hyperlink. The Netscape developers found...

Chapter 14. Mobile Devices Just now, as most web developers have become very proficient at developing engaging content for the popular PC-based browsers, they are being confronted with the challenge of providing equally elegant pages for...

Chapter 15. XML HTML is a maverick. It only loosely follows the rules of formal electronic document-markup design and implementation. The language was born out of the need to assemble text, graphics, and other digital content and send the...

Chapter 16. XHTML Despite its name, you don't use the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to directly create and mark up web documents. Instead, you use XML to define a new markup language, which you then use to mark up web documents. T...

Chapter 17. Tips, Tricks, and Hacks We've sprinkled a number of tips, tricks, and hacks throughout this book, along with style guidelines, examples, and instructions. So why have a special chapter on tips, tricks, and hacks? Because HTML...