Creating cool Web sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS

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Creating Cool

Web Sites with

HTML, XHTML,

and CSS

Dave Taylor

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Creating Cool

Web Sites with

HTML, XHTML,

and CSS

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Creating Cool

Web Sites with

HTML, XHTML,

and CSS

Dave Taylor

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Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS

Published by

Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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Copyright © 2004 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Control Number: 2004100892

ISBN: 0-7645-5738-6

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About the Author

Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980, when he first logged in as an

undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego. Since then, he’s been a research

scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, reviews editor for SunWorld

magazine, and founder of four companies: The Internet Mall, iTrack.com, AnswerSquad, and

ClickThruStats.com. Currently, Dave is president of Intuitive Systems and is busy launching

an electronic book publishing company called Intuitive Press.

Dave has designed over 50 Web sites, both commercial and nonprofit, and has published

more than 1000 articles about the Internet, Unix, Macintosh, interface design, and business

topics. His books include Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther (O’Reilly), Wicked Cool Shell

Scripts (No Starch Press), Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours (Sams Publishing), and Solaris

For Dummies (Wiley Publishing).

Dave holds a master’s degree in Educational Computing from Purdue University, an M.B.A.

from the University of Baltimore, an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the

University of California at San Diego, and is an adjunct professor at the University of

Colorado, Boulder, and the University of Phoenix Online.

You can find Dave Taylor online just about any time at http://www.intuitive.com/, or

you can send him electronic mail at [email protected].

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Credits

Senior Acquisitions Editor

Jim Minatel

Development Editors

Jodi Jensen

Brian Herrmann

Production Editor

Felicia Robinson

Technical Editing

Wiley-Dreamtech India Pvt Ltd

Copy Editor

Mary Lagu

Editorial Manager

Mary Beth Wakefield

Vice President and Executive Group Publisher

Richard Swadley

Vice President and Executive Publisher

Bob Ipsen

Vice President and Publisher

Joseph B. Wikert

Executive Editorial Director

Mary Bednarek

Project Coordinator

April Farling

Graphics and Production Specialists

Beth Brooks

Jonelle Burns

Jennifer Heleine

Quality Control Technician

Susan Moritz

Permissions Editor

Laura Moss

Media Development Specialist

Angela Denny

Book Designer

Kathie S. Schnorr

Proofreading and Indexing

Publication Services

Cover Design

Michael Trent

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To Kiana, Gareth, and Ashley, my guardian angels

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Preface

Who should buy this book? What’s covered? How do I read this book? Why should I

read this book? HTML? XHTML? CSS? Sheesh! Why not just use a Web page editor?

Who am I?

Welcome!

“Wow! Another Web book! What makes this one different?”

That’s a fair question. I want you to be confident that Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML,

XHTML, and CSS will meet your needs as well as provide fun and interesting reading. So

spend a minute and breeze through my preface to ensure that this is the book you seek. . . .

What This Book Is About

In a nutshell, Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS is an introduction to

HTML, XHTML, and Cascading Style Sheets. HTML is the HyperText Markup Language, and

it’s the language that enables you to create and publish your own multimedia documents on

the World Wide Web. Millions of users on the Internet and online services such as America

Online, Earthlink, and the Microsoft Network are spending hours each day exploring the world

of the Web from within their Web browser, be it Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, or any of

a variety of other programs. XHTML is the modern “proper” version of HTML and is the future

of the markup language. Cascading Style Sheets are also part of that future, and it’s a rare

modern Web site that doesn’t use at least some element of CSS in its design and layout.

By using all these technologies, you can learn to quickly and easily create attractive docu￾ments that are on the cutting edge of interactive publishing. I went through the pain of learn￾ing HTML back in 1994, the very dawn of the Web era, precisely because I wanted to spread

my ideas to a global audience. For me, learning was hit or miss because the only references

I could find were confusing online documents written by programmers and computer types.

For you, it will be a lot easier. By reading this book and exploring the software and samples

included on the companion Web site, you can learn not only the nuts and bolts of HTML,

XHTML, and CSS, but also quite a lot about how to design and create useful, attractive Web

sites and spread the word about them on the Net.

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xii Preface

Before you delve into this book, you should know the basics: what the Internet is, how to get

on it, and how to use your Web browser. If you seek detailed information on these topics, you

can find many interesting and useful books from Wiley Publishing at http://www.wiley.com/

compbooks. After you have this basic knowledge, you’ll find that Creating Cool Web Sites with

HTML, XHTML, and CSS is a fun introduction to the art and science of creating interesting—

and, if I may say so, cool—Web sites that you’ll be proud of and that other users will want to

visit and explore.

Why Not Just Use a Web Page Builder?

If you’ve already flipped through this book to see what’s covered, you’ve seen a ton of differ￾ent sample listings with lots and lots of < and > instructions. Yet the advertisements in every

computer magazine are telling you that you don’t need to get your hands dirty with HTML

and CSS when you can use a Web page editor. So what’s the scoop?

The scoop—or the problem, really—is that every Web page editor I’ve used is designed to

create pages for a particular Web browser and has at best a limited understanding of the rich,

complex, evolving HTML language. Use Microsoft Front Page 2000, for example, and your

site will almost certainly look best in Internet Explorer (a Microsoft product).

It’s a subtle but insidious problem. One clue to this lurking problem is that surveys of Web

developers invariably demonstrate that almost all the most popular Web sites are coded by

hand, not with fancy page-building systems.

A development company that I occasionally help with online design recently sent me a plea

because they had encountered this inconsistency in browser presentation:

Dave, Help! Everything looks different in the different browsers!! This is turning

out to be a nightmare! How much effect do different browsers have on the

appearance of the site? My customer is using AOL and from the e-mail she sent

me, things are a mess. When I look at the site, it pretty much is ok. There are a

few modifications to make - font, bold - but what’s going on?

That’s one of the greatest frustrations for all Web site designers: Not only do different versions

of Web browsers support different versions of HTML and CSS, but the exact formatting that

results from a given HTML tag or CSS style varies by Web browser, too. It’s why the mantra

of all good Web designers is “test, test, test.”

In fact, if you’re going to get serious about Web development, I would suggest that you con￾sider a setup like I have: Before you officially say that you’re done with a project, check all

the pages with the two most recent major releases of the two biggest Web browsers on both a

Mac and a Windows system. (That’s a total of eight different browsers. Right now, I have the

two most recent versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape loaded on both of my computers.)