Html for Fun and Profit - Softcover

Morris, Mary E. S.; Simpson, John E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0130796727 ISBN 13: 9780130796721

Publisher: Prentice Hall Ptr, 1997

Synopsis

The previous editions of this classic HTML reference have sold over 71,000 copies. This greatly expanded revision focuses on Web refinement in an enterprise environment--how true Web pros can revamp existing pages to maximize effectiveness and performance. The book includes detailed coverage of advanced topics like DHTML and Cascading Style Sheets--both of which enable programmers to build more dynamic pages which download quicker. .

About this title

About the Author

MARY E. S. MORRIS is author of CyberCareers (Prentice Hall PTR). Formerly Technical Webmaster at Sun Microsystems, she is founder of Finesse Liveware, which provides technology and feasibility analyses for the commercial Internet community.
JOHN E. SIMPSON is the Distributed Systems Specialist at the City of Tallahassee Public Works Department. He wrote Crossed Wires, and has been a frequent contributor to DOS World, Web Now! and Practical Windows.

From the Back Cover

The HTML and Web authoring guide that became an instant classic!
Experienced web developers agree: HTML for Fun and Profit is the best way to learn HTML. Completely revised and updated, the third edition features in-depth coverage of the fundamentals AND all the hottest new HTML innovations. You will quickly master using tags, adding hyperlinks, graphics and multimedia, and creating clickable imagemaps. You will also learn the benefits of tables and frames and how to generate pages "on the fly."


*Build easy-to-update pages with Dynamic HTML and Cascading Style Sheets

*Connect your web pages to valuable databases with CGI scripts

*Customize your pages with "Server includes"

*Create automated forms for processing data from users and customers

*Make the most of JavaScript and other "client-side" scripting tools

HTML experts Morris and Simpson provide everything you need to get the job done right:


*Common-sense style guidelines and the latest authoring tools

*State-of-the-art website design and management tips

*Rigorous testing and quality assurance techniques

This is the one book every webmaster, designer or HTML user should have by their keyboard.

From the Inside Flap

Preface

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the language of the World Wide Web, the fastest growing part of a very quickly evolving phenomenon called the Internet. This new edition of HTML for Fun and Profit covers basic HTML authoring and emphasizes the use of CGI scripts and forms to create customized and interactive web pages. Information is also included on some of the newest features, like cascading style sheets, that have at last brought HTML into the real publishing world.


Third Edition Preface

The third edition now includes a Microsoft Windows 95 web server. In addition, the text contains many updates to reflect the most recent version of the HTML standard, version 3.2, client-side processing, and a wide variety of other new enhancements to web page makeup, such as cascading style sheets. New media types, such as streaming audio, are covered. The bulk of Appendix B is now included on the CD-ROM as a hypertext document for easier reference.


Who Should Use This Book

If you want to make a home page to list your musical preferences, this book is for you. If you want to make a high-tech career out of building storefronts for the newest commercial ventures, this book is for you also. No matter what your ambitions, if you want to be a producer of information instead of just a consumer on the Web, this book will help you learn HTML and related technologies.
Furthermore, if you're already an experienced web designer and HTML author, this book can take you to new levels of professionalism by introducing you to current standards and practices in this fast-changing field.


How This Book Is Organized

Part I: The Static Web

This section gives you a sound basis for developing most of the information you will be placing on your website. Chapter 1, “Getting Started,” provides an overview of the history of the World-Wide Web and lays out some of the authors' basic assumptions and philosophies. Chapter 2, “The Basics,” introduces the concept of a tag and demonstrates the use of several simple tags. Chapter 3, “Hypertext — Linking Documents,” describes hypertext and document interaction in HTML. Here we'll also cover non-text forms of hyperlinking, such as image maps. Chapter 4, “Multimedia — Going Beyond Text,” explains the full range of data beyond plain text and shows how to incorporate multimedia into your web creations. Chapter 5, “Tables,” teaches how to create basic tables and identifies table components. Chapter 6, “Frames,” covers the most effective ways to use this still-novel way of structuring complex documents.

Part II: The Dynamic Web

This section covers approaches to interacting with your website's users and generating web documents “on the fly” to respond to changes in data or the context in which the user views your site. Chapter 7, “Using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI),” introduces the Common Gateway Interface which enables developers to tie scripts to web pages. Chapter 8, “Server Includes,” demonstrates the use of commands that are included or embedded in web pages to customize web pages. Chapter 9, “Creating Forms,” details the variety of form elements and implements several forms. Chapter 10, “Processing Data from Forms,” discusses input and output handling from the CGI and implements a feedback form. Chapter 11, “Client-Side Processing,” offers basic information about handling user interaction without server intervention through scripting tools such as JavaScript and other means. Chapter 12, “Cascading Style Sheets,” demonstrates the use of style sheets to simplify HTML document maintenance and control and improve your pages' user interface.

Part III: Design, Style, Production, Professionalism

In this section you will move beyond the nitty-gritty details of simply creating web documents into the realm of organizing and presenting your site for maximum impact. Chapter 13, “Style Guide,” outlines common-sense guidelines to make web pages more intuitive to use and more appealing to all audiences. Chapter 14, “Work-Saving Tools,” explains the classes of available tools that make HTML authoring less tedious. Chapter 15, “Testing/Quality Assurance,” describes the steps necessary to ensure that your web site as a whole and its component documents can withstand the rigors of use in the real world. Chapter 16, “Publishing to the Web,” shows you how to move your existing documents to the Web without re-creating them all from scratch. Chapter 17, “Putting Data on the Internet,” discusses the issues involved in putting your data out for public consumption. Chapter 18, “Future Directions,” highlights the trends and directions of the World-Wide Web.

Appendices

Appendix A, “References,” provides a complete list of the tags, environment variables, and special characters listed throughout the book. Appendix B, “More Information,” lists pointers to additional resources. (Most of this material is also provided in hypertext form on the accompanying CD-ROM.)

Typographic Conventions

Table PR-1 describes the typographic conventions used in this book. Table PR-1

Typographic Conventions Typeface or Style Description Examples AaBbCc123 The names of commands, files, tag attributes, and directories; on-screen computer output Edit your .login file. Use ls -a to list all files. system% You have mail. AaBbCc123 What you type, contrasted with on-screen computer output system% su password: AaBbCc123 Command-line placeholder: replace with a real name or value To delete a file, type rm filename. Abc Def Labels which appear in on-screen buttons Click the Submit button to send the form's date to the server. Other notes on this book's formatting conventions:

Screen shots depict Web documents as viewed using the Netscape Communicator browser, Netscape Navigator 4.03.

URLs, those strings beginning with http:// which indicate a Web document's location, may occasionally break at the end of a line. In such cases, to avoid confusion, there will be no hyphen at the end of the line which breaks.

Names of Internet services (e.g., TELNET, Archie, FTP) will be capitalized and displayed in a normal typeface. Many of these services have command or protocol equivalents (e.g., telnet, archie, ftp); these will be displayed in lowercase boldface font.

The terms “web” (lowercase) and “Web” (uppercase) will be used to refer to, respectively, a particular site (as in the phrase “designing your web”) and to the World-Wide Web as a whole (“when browsing the Web”).


Are You Being Served?

If you have done any work at all with HTML already—even simply experimented with some of your browser's capabilities—you know that you can view a local file (that is, a file located on whatever machine you're using) simply by opening it directly. To open a remote file you specify its location using a Universal Resource Locator, or URL, which includes a reference to the identity of the machine on which the remote file resides. (More information about URLs is provided in Chapter 2, and especially in Chapter 3).


Once you've installed the server software provided on this book's accompanying CD-ROM, you have two options to view the sample files discussed throughout the book:

You can open the sample files as you would any local files—that is, by entering in the browser's Location field the path and filename to be browsed. (For example, on a Windows 95 PC, file:///D:\Win95\somesample.html.)

You can start the server software you've installed and open the file to be viewed through the medium of that server. For example, after starting the WebSite 2.0 server for Windows 95, you can enter http://localserver/somesample.html in the browser's Location field.


In most cases, either of these approaches yields the same result in your browser window. Fonts, paragraphs, headings, images, and other elements will appear identically regardless of whether you've opened the sample directly (as a true local file) or as a “pseudoremote” file (by passing it through the server software to your browser).


However, particularly in the case of some more advanced features (such as forms which use CGI programs), you must use the “pseudoremote” option in order to view the page properly. In these cases, the name of the file to be opened will be designated in this book using an http://{server}/ prefix. In all cases where this prefix does not appear, you can safely assume that the sample page can be viewed as either a local file or as a “served” file.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall Ptr
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0130796727
• ISBN 13: 9780130796721
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 400