HTML Pocket Reference

As publishers, O'Reilly go from one extreme to another! After producing their encyclopedic Definitive Guides, they have now started a series of bare bones reference books which list only basics and actually will fit in your pocket.

The latest by Jennifer Niederst is based on her best-selling Web Design in a Nutshell. It's a guide to HTML coding intended for an instant check on all those tags which nobody can be expected to remember any more. The entries are arranged alphabetically, from A (anchor) to WBR (word break). An item is defined, then there's a list of which popular browsers will recognise it, from Netscape, Internet Explorer, and WebTV, to Opera.



There's also a note on whether the tag is deprecated in the current specification. At the end of the book, there's a list of character entities (the keyboard, plus all the much-used signs and symbols) and a very useful list of colour names plus their definitions in terms of R-G-B values, hexadecimal, and the nearest Web-safe colour.

For those people who are interested in the brain-scrambling business of hexadecimals, there's also a decimal conversion chart. The layout and design are executed to the usually high O'Reilly production values - which means that all entries are easy to find and read.

The irony of these pocket reference books is that the information they contain is so compressed, with absolutely no illustrative matter, that they will only be of use to quite confident HTML code buffs. And that I suppose is their intended audience. In his recent enthusiastic review, one Amazon customer reveals that he bought two copies - one for the office and one for home.