xii
Preface
Before you delve into this book, you should know the basics: what the Internet is, how to get on it, and how to use your Web browser. If you seek detailed information on these topics, you can find many interesting and useful books from Wiley Publishing at http://www.wiley.com/ compbooks. After you have this basic knowledge, you’ll find that Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS is a fun introduction to the art and science of creating interesting— and, if I may say so, cool—Web sites that you’ll be proud of and that other users will want to visit and explore.
Why Not Just Use a Web Page Builder? If you’ve already flipped through this book to see what’s covered, you’ve seen a ton of differ ent sample listings with lots and lots of < and > instructions. Yet the advertisements in every computer magazine are telling you that you don’t need to get your hands dirty with HTML and CSS when you can use a Web page editor. So what’s the scoop? The scoop—or the problem, really—is that every Web page editor I’ve used is designed to create pages for a particular Web browser and has at best a limited understanding of the rich, complex, evolving HTML language. Use Microsoft Front Page 2000, for example, and your site will almost certainly look best in Internet Explorer (a Microsoft product). It’s a subtle but insidious problem. One clue to this lurking problem is that surveys of Web developers invariably demonstrate that almost all the most popular Web sites are coded by hand, not with fancy page-building systems. A development company that I occasionally help with online design recently sent me a plea because they had encountered this inconsistency in browser presentation: Dave, Help! Everything looks different in the different browsers!! This is turning out to be a nightmare! How much effect do different browsers have on the appearance of the site? My customer is using AOL and from the e-mail she sent me, things are a mess. When I look at the site, it pretty much is ok. There are a few modifications to make - font, bold - but what’s going on? That’s one of the greatest frustrations for all Web site designers: Not only do different versions of Web browsers support different versions of HTML and CSS, but the exact formatting that results from a given HTML tag or CSS style varies by Web browser, too. It’s why the mantra of all good Web designers is “test, test, test.” In fact, if you’re going to get serious about Web development, I would suggest that you con sider a setup like I have: Before you officially say that you’re done with a project, check all the pages with the two most recent major releases of the two biggest Web browsers on both a Mac and a Windows system. (That’s a total of eight different browsers. Right now, I have the two most recent versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape loaded on both of my computers.)