Sams Teach Yourself HTML 4 in 24 Hours

By Dick Oliver

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Author
  • Acknowledgments
  • Tell Us What You Think!
  • Put Your HTML Page Online Today
  • I. Your First Web Page
  • Hour 1. Understanding HTML and XML
  • Hour 2. Create a Web Page Right Now
  • Hour 3. Linking to Other Web Pages
  • Hour 4. Publishing Your HTML Pages
  • II. Web Page Text
  • Hour 5. Text Alignment and Lists
  • Hour 6. Text Formatting and Font Control
  • Hour 7. Email Links and Links Within a Page
  • Hour 8. Creating HTML Forms
  • III. Web Page Graphics
  • Hour 9. Creating Your Own Web Page Graphics
  • Hour 10. Putting Graphics on a Web Page
  • Hour 11. Custom Backgrounds and Colors
  • Hour 12. Creating Animated Graphics
  • IV. Web Page Design
  • Hour 13. Page Design and Layout
  • Hour 14. Graphical Links and Imagemaps
  • Hour 15. Advanced Layout with Tables
  • Hour 16. Using Style Sheets
  • V. Dynamic Web Pages
  • Hour 17. Embedding Multimedia in Web Pages
  • Hour 18. Interactive Pages with Applets and ActiveX
  • Hour 19. Web Page Scripting for Non-Programmers
  • Hour 20. Setting Pages in Motion with Dynamic HTML
    • Learning How to Fly
    • Dividing a Web Page into Layers
    • Offering Alternate Content in Plain HTML
    • Being Compatible with Incompatible Browsers
    • Moving a Layer Around with JavaScript
    • Interactive Layer Animation
    • Summary
    • Q&A
    • Workshop
  • VI. Building a Web Site
  • Hour 21. Multipage Layout with Frames
  • Hour 22. Organizing and Managing a Web Site
  • Hour 23. Helping People Find Your Web Pages
  • Hour 24. Planning for the Future of HTML
  • VII. Appendixes
  • A. Readers' Most Frequently Asked Questions
  • B. HTML Learning Resources on the Internet
  • C. Complete HTML 4 Quick Reference
  • D. HTML Character Entities

Q&A

1. Isn't there some way to make layers without using the style attribute?

   Only in Netscape Navigator versions 3 and 4. Netscape invented its own <layer> tag, which is unlikely to ever become part of the HTML standard or to be supported by other browsers. For more information on this tag, visit http://developer.netscape.com.

2. In Hour 16 you stressed the concept of keeping style specifications in a separate document, but in this hour you put all the style stuff right in with the HTML. Aren't you being hypocritical?

   Sort of. It is often a good idea to keep styles in a separate document, and you can combine true style sheets and Dynamic HTML. For example, I could have made a style sheet that included a style like the following:

   div.peekaboo {position: absolute; left: -250px; top: 10px; width: 300;}
   

   I could then have applied that style to each of the three file tab layers with <div class="peekaboo">. Doing so, however, would probably have just made the page harder to understand and maintain. When you are working with JavaScript and style-based positioning, I usually find it easier and more efficient to use inline styles than to use separate style sheets.

3. I'm a professional programmer, and I think it was inelegant of you to employ global variables instead of parameter passing in your implementation of the recursive function slide(). Furthermore…

   Was that a question? I didn't think so. Get over it, okay?

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