Jon Duckett - Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS

Contents

Grouping Elements with

Element

Creating a Form with theElement

Structuring Your Forms withand Elements

Element

Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS

Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS
Copyright 2004 by Wiley Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published simultaneously in Canada

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ISBN: 0-7645-7078-1

About the Author

Jon Duckett published his first Web site in 1996 while studying for a BSc (Hons) in Psychology at Brunel University, London. Since then he has helped create a wide variety of Web sites and has co-written more than ten programming-related books on topics from ASP to XML (via many other letters of the alphabet) covering diverse aspects of Web programming including design, architecture, and coding.

After graduation, Jon worked for Wrox Press first in its Birmingham (UK) offices for three years and then in Sydney, Australia, for another year. He is now a freelance developer and consultant based in a leafy suburb of London, working for a range of clients spread across three continents.

When not stuck in front of a computer screen, Jon enjoys listening to music and writing.

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Introduction

There are a lot of books about designing and building Web pages, so thank you for picking up this one. Why do I think it is different? Well, the Web has been around for quite a few years now, and during its life several technologies have been introduced to help you create Web pages, some of which have lasted, others of which have disappeared. Indeed, even enduring technologies such as HTML have had features added and removed over the years. Many books that teach you to write Web pages are revisions of earlier versions of the same book and therefore still take the same approach as the previous edition did. This book, however, is completely new, written from scratch, and its purpose is to teach you how to create Web pages for the Web as it is today and will be for the next few years. Once you have worked through this book, it should continue to serve as a helpful reference text you can keep nearby and dip into when you need to.

About the Book

At the time of this writing, Internet Explorer version 6 and Netscape version 7 are the main Web browsers, and each of the previous versions of these browsers had added new features as the Web developed (and sometimes old features were removed). As all this change might suggest, there is more than one way to build a Web site. For example, if you want to have a heading for a page displayed in a bold, black, Arial typeface, you can achieve this in several ways. However, you can also consider this a very good time to come to the Web, as many of the technologies used to create Web pages are maturing, and favored methods for creating Web sites, or best practices, are emerging.

Writing Web pages today thus requires a balance. On the one hand you want to use the latest and best methods, while on the other hand you have to remember that not everyone who visits your Web site has the latest browser software. So you need to be able to write pages that take advantage of the features of the latest browsers while at the same time ensuring your sites can be viewed in older browsers. (Indeed, if you want to make a living from working on Web pages, you will need to be aware of some of the older ways of doing things.) In this book, I teach you the best practices that you should be learning, and, where necessary, I expose the older techniques that help you achieve the results you want.

Over the past few years there have also been innovations and changes in the way people access the Internet. The Web is no longer just viewed on desktop computers; Web sites are becoming available on devices with small screens, such as mobile phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants), and some devices such as televisions have lower resolutions than computer monitors. There are even stories in the newspapers about how we will all soon have refrigerators and other appliances that will allow us to browse the Web. So, while most of the examples in this book are written for a computer, I will teach you to code your Web pages so that you can make them available to other devices without rewriting your whole site. Learning to code for the emerging generation of applications will make your Web sites and your skills last much longer.