This guide describes itself as "an introductory book meant for those of you in English and Communications...Humanities and other academic areas". Its emphasis is on creating Web pages rather than formal instruction in writing.
Victor Vitanza tries to convey the sense of fun in putting your own materials onto the Net, though he is quite right to insist on "the necessity...to live in two radically different cultural environments - on paper and on monitors". It's a good feature of his approach that he makes a conscious effort to lead students through this necessary transformation.
His structure is basic and sensible.
He starts with 'What is the Web? and what is its basic language?'
HTML coding is explained in a way which anybody can follow. It's written in a user-friendly style without too much jargon, and with plenty of illustrations and screenshots. Each section is followed by a good-quality bibliography of books and online resources.
Page design tips are accompanied by diagrams of full page coding which are well laid out on the page and explained by the liberal use of 'comments' [that's
<!-- --> this device] although occasionally the coding is a long way from the page it illustrates and some of it looks rather odd - such as the double paragraph tag <P><P> (the second of which is redundant).
He shows how to use tables to position text horizontally and vertically on the page, and there's a final chapter which tells you how to get your results up onto the Web and a checklist of common problems. There are also appendices of important sources for humanities students, image scanning; search engines; and bibliographic citation.
All in all then, this is a reassuring guide for those who wish to make the transition from writing on paper to presenting their work digitally in what is now the new universal medium.
