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

What You Can Do Today to Be Ready for Tomorrow

If you've made your way through most of this book's hours, you already have one of the most important ingredients for future success in the new digital world: a solid working knowledge of HTML and XHTML.

Chances are that your primary reason for learning HTML at this time was to create some Web pages, but I hope this hour has convinced you that you'll be using XHTML for far more than that in the future. Here are some of the factors you should consider when planning and building your Web site today so that it will also serve you well tomorrow:

• Whenever you run into something that you'd like to do on a Web page, but can't with HTML as it stands today, include a comment in the page so you can add that feature when it becomes possible in the future. The multimedia and interactive portions of your site are likely to need more revisions to keep up with current technology than will the text and graphics portions. When possible, keep the more cutting-edge elements of your site separate and take especially good care to document them well with the <!-- and -- > comment tags.
• Although new technologies such as Java and ActiveX might be the wave of the future, avoid them today except when developing for disk-based media or a fast local intranet. Even when everyone is using 56Kbps or faster modems, many people will move on to a different site before they'll wait for an applet or interactive movie to download, initialize, and start working.
• Because style sheets give you complete control over the choice and measurements of type on your Web pages, it is a good idea to study basic typography now if you aren't familiar with it. Understanding and working with things such as leading, kerning, em spaces, and drop caps have long been essential for producing truly professional-quality paper pages. It will soon be essential for producing outstanding Web pages, too.
• The potential of JavaScript and other Web page scripting languages is currently hobbled by incompatible and buggy implementations. This should change fast when the new Document Object Model (DOM) standard comes out in 1999. Learning basic scripting now will put you one step ahead when the first truly standardized version of the language makes a much greater variety of interactive scripting applications possible.
• When you design your pages, don't assume that everyone who sees them will be using a computer. Televisions, video telephones, game consoles, and many other devices might have access to them as well. Some of these devices have very low-resolution screens (with as few as 320x200 pixels). Although it's difficult to design a Web page to look good at that resolution, you'll reach the widest possible audience if you do.
• As older Web browsers fall out of general use, you will be able to layer images and text on top of each other more reliably. That means that many things you need large images for today you will be able to do much more efficiently with several small image elements tomorrow. Always keep copies of each individual image element that goes into a larger graphic, without any text. This will let you easily optimize the graphics later without re-creating everything from scratch.

• Several new standards have been issued or are about to be issued by the World Wide Web Consortium. These include:

  • Synchronized Multimedia Interface Language (SMIL)
  • Mathematics Markup Language (MathML)
  • eXtensible Style Sheet Language (XSL)
  • Some early proposals for a graphics markup language

  On the privacy and security front, new standards include:

  • Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS)
  • Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P)
  • Digital Signature standard (Dsig)

  Since these advances are likely to both expand the potential capabilities of your Web site and change some of the methods you currently use to build Web pages, you should visit the http://www.w3c.org site and take the time to learn a little about each of them.

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