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
  • 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
    • HTML Beyond the Web
    • From Calculators to Communicators
    • HTML as the New User Interface
    • The Digital Media Revolution
    • XML: Unity in Diversity
    • XHTML, the New HTML
    • HTML Applications of the Future
    • What You Can Do Today to Be Ready for Tomorrow
    • Summary
    • Q&A
    • Workshop
  • 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

HTML Beyond the Web

The intimate familiarity with HTML you gained from reading this book will be one of the most important (and profitable) skills that anyone can have in the next few years. However, most of the HTML pages you create in your lifetime will probably not be Web pages.

To understand why, and to see the big picture of where HTML is headed, consider the following features of the latest HTML standard:

• Through style sheets and scripting, HTML now gives you precise control over the appearance and functionality of virtually any textual and graphical information.
• All major programming languages, interactive media, and database formats can also be seamlessly integrated with HTML.
• HTML's extended character sets and fonts can now be used to communicate in the native script of almost any human language in the world.
• New data security standards are finally making it practical to carry out financial and other sensitive transactions with HTML, and to manage confidential or restricted-access information.
• All future versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system will use HTML as a fundamental part of the user interface. Nearly all current versions of office productivity software also support HTML.

All this adds up to a very near future where HTML will, without a doubt, play a central role—it might even be accurate to say the central role—in the display and exchange of almost all information across all computers and computer networks on Earth. This sounds important because it is important. However, this hour will make a case that HTML will have an even more important role than that to play. To understand how that can be so, we'll need to take another step back to see an even bigger picture: the changing role of the computer itself in our society.

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