Dynamic Html in Action

Showing how to use Dynamic HTML as a multimedia authoring tool for Web, network, or CD-ROM-based productions, Web gurus Pardi and Schurman describe topics such as cascading style sheets; the Internet Explorer 4 object model; scripting and scriplets; multimedia effects, including filters and transitions; multimedia controls, including the ActiveMovie API, Structured Graphics, and Sequencer controls; and data binding/tabular data controls. The CD-ROM contains examples as well as Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 and the Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 Client SDK. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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