"Dynamic HTML in Action, Second Edition", is a valuable guide for HTML/Web authors eager to get the most out of the extended interactive and multimedia abilities of Dynamic HTML version 2 (as featured in Internet Explorer 5 and possibly supported by Netscape as well). "Dynamic HTML in Action, Second Edition", covers everything that makes Internet Explorer 5 the next breakthrough technology for creating dynamic Web content: Dynamic HTML, dynamic content and dynamic styles, the Internet Explorer 5 object model, new Table features, 2D positioning, and data binding. All topics are covered in clear, succinct language with plenty of sample pages on the CD to make learning these new tools as engaging and interesting as the content Web users will eventually create.
Dynamic HTML in Action does a great job of explaining how to use HTML and Dynamic HTML, as well as client-side scripting languages and other Web technologies (particularly as they apply to Microsoft's client-side Web software). Primarily, this book reveals a lot about the ways Web designers can make their pages' content look its best. Supplemented with information about the technologies that enable clients to make queries against databases,
Dynamic HTML in Action will do a lot to improve the quality of the material on Web sites and intranets.
The early portions of this book will look familiar to anyone who's built any sort of Web page, since the authors cover traditional HTML tags first. From there, they proceed to show how to incorporate client-side scripts in HTML documents by providing a fine tutorial on event handlers, data structures, control structures, and the relevant aspects of object orientation, particularly in JavaScript. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)--still the most popular way to define complex styles--get excellent explanatory treatment. Dynamic HTML in Action also shows how to integrate scripting by using scripts to alter styles. Filters and transitions are well documented, along with embedded multimedia.
This book isn't all about appearances. There's solid coverage of Dynamic HTML's capacity to work with Data Source Objects (DSOs) and data bindings that provide efficient connections between client-side documents and back-end databases. And while the authors stop well short of fully documenting Extensible Markup Language (XML), they do provide an excellent introduction to the capabilities of this up-and-coming data-description system. --David Wall
