Monday, August 27, 2001		IT Bookshelf

Learn the basics of HTML

THE Net has enabled people to connect with the world. It is almost as important today as the computer itself. The World Wide Web is the most important and exciting component of the Internet, which provides the way to share resources with all others out there. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the language of Internet’s World Wide Web.

This book covers various topics to start learning HTML. Written in a simple and easy-to-understand language, it contains four chapters—Introduction to HTML and its features, Advanced HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and Dynamic HTML.

The introduction part gives information on various components of the World Wide Web and client/server architecture and also the working of the Web. A brief introduction to Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) and XML is also given. A brief history of earlier versions of the HTML is also provided along with the capabilities of HTML 4.0. Types of HTML pages—Static, Dynamic and Directory Listing—are explained with diagrams. The getting-started section helps to create your own HTML pages by providing different elements, tags and their uses with examples.

Advanced HTML helps in designing pages in an attractive way using tags like the table tag, frame tag, forms, imagemap, etc. It also tells you about object embedding using the <OBJECT> element, how to include JavaScript, VBScript and Java Applet codes in HTML page.

For efficient creation of the Web pages, the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) part takes up style sheets to control various styles in a Web document. Benefits and properties of CSS and grouping of styles and applying style sheets to a document are discussed with the help of tags and examples.

Dynamic HTML helps to create more interactive Web pages with better control. This part introduces DHTML, its working in Netscape Navigator, and DHTML in Internet Explorer. In Cross-Browser Dynamic HTML, the Document Object Model (DOM) makes use of JavaScript object to enable DHTML work in both browsers.

Each chapter contains a hands-on exercise section. A Test Your Knowledge section at the end of each chapter provides certain exercises meant to check your progress. The appendix gives the version history of HTML and a comparison table of HTML tags for Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

A good book for those wanting to start out with HTML, it has also touched upon advanced topics like Object embedding, JavaScript, VBScript, Java Applet, though not in detail.

— Laxmi Kant Verma