Creating Cool Web Pages

People looking for a good HTML instruction manual now face a serious problem - they're spoiled for choice. There are so many books on offer, the difficulty is telling the difference between them. Yet these differences might be crucial. You can now learn HTML in a month, a fortnight, a week, or even twenty-four hours - which quite frankly is ridiculous.

Dave Taylor takes a plain-speaking and straightforward approach to the basics of HTML which is commendably free of the over-jargonised and hyperbolic prose of his competitors.He starts by explaining browsers and what they do, gives a quick analysis of URLs, then gets straight down to the basics of tags, page layout, text styles, lists, and hyperlinks. It's all done in a simple and clear manner, with screenshots and short illustrations of the HTML code for each stage of the process.


There's a particularly good section on graphic images and how to position and manipulate them. Each chapter is punctuated with quick tips and workarounds - those invaluable gobbets of experience which it would otherwise take months if not years to learn. It's a friendly approach, with quick pointers towards the more sophisticated techniques of good design if you want to follow them.

Most of his examples come from what Net guru David Siegel would call 'first generation' sites. Text stretches across the full width of the screen, and is broken up by various vertical separators. At first this seemed rather old-fashioned, but eventually perhaps not a bad thing. After all, beginners don't want to be swamped by tricky page layout when they're grappling with basics.

He takes the lessons as far as image maps, Java script, plug-ins, cgi scripts, cascading style sheets, and layers - then towards the end he unleashes a quick view of the novelties in the HTML standard 4.0 and how they can be used. These include in-line frames, the 'Q' tag, the soft hyphen < &shy; >, and audit trail tags which embed a record of amendments into a document, which I think might be very useful for some forms of electronic writing.

The book ends with an explanation of meta-tags and sound advice on registering web sites with search engines - all the time admitting the differences between applications in Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer [both of which come with the packaged CD].

There are four appendices, including one which explains in quick stages how to build your first page, with notes on creating graphics - which made me wish I'd had it on hand in the early days, instead of grappling with the ultra-technical W3C standards document. I've read lots of HTML manuals since then - many of them bigger, fatter, and more complex - but this is one of the few I'm going to keep by as a handy reference, because it's so clearly written and well-organised.