Sams Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML and XHTML in 21 Days by Laura Lemay, Rafe Colburn, Rafe Colburn, Rafe Colburn (Revised by)

From the Publisher

Sams Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML and XHTML in 21 Days, Fourth Edition is a new edition of the best-selling book that started the whole HTML/Web publishing phenomenon.

The entire book has been revised and refined to freshen up its appearance and to bring it up to date with current Web publishing practices and technologies. Yet all the original style, flavor, and features that have made this book so popular since its first edition are retained and expanded upon.

Booknews

In a series of 21 tutorials, the author demonstrates the steps for designing a web site, transferring the site to a server on the web, adding images and animated graphics, creating forms and cascading style sheets, and building structured documents using XHTML. The third edition covers HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Day 1: The World of the World Wide Web

• What the World Wide Web is, and why it's really cool

• Web browsers: what they do, and a couple of popular ones from which to choose

• What a Web server is, and why you need one

• Some information about uniform resource locators (URLs)

What Is the World Wide Web?

If I were he, I'd describe the World Wide Web as a global, interactive, dynamic, cross-platform, distributed, graphical hypertext information system that runs over the Internet. Whew! Unless you understand each of these words and how they fit together, this description isn't going to make much sense. (My friend often doesn't make much sense, either.)

So let's look at all these words and see what they mean in the context of how you'll be using the Web as a publishing medium.

The Web Is a Hypertext Information System

The idea behind hypertext is that instead of reading text in a rigid, linear structure (such as a book), you can skip easily from one point to another. You can get more information, go back, jump to other topics, and navigate through the text based on what interests you at the time.

New Term
Hypertext enables you to read and navigate text and visual information in a nonlinear way, based on what you want to know next.

Online help systems, such as Windows Help on PCs or Apple Help on the Macintosh, use hypertext to present information. To get more information on a topic, you just click that topic. The topic might be a link that takes you to a new screen (or window or dialog box) that contains the new information. Perhaps you'll find links on words or phrases that take you to still other screens, and links on those screens that take you even farther away from your original topic. Figure 1.1 shows a simple diagram of how this kind of system works....

...Imagine that your online help system is linked to another online help system on another application related to yours; for example, your drawing program's help is linked to your word processor's help. Your word processor's help is then linked to an encyclopedia, where you can look up any other concepts that you don't understand. The encyclopedia is hooked into a global index of magazine articles that enables you to get the most recent information on the topics the encyclopedia covers. The article index also then is linked to information about the writers of those articles and some pictures of their children (see Figure 1.2)....

...If you had all these interlinked help systems available with every program you bought, you would rapidly run out of disk space. You also might question whether you needed all this information when all you wanted to know was how to do one simple task. All this information could be expensive, too.

However, if the information didn't take up much disk space, it were freely available, and you could get it reasonably quickly any time you wanted, the system would be more interesting. In fact, the information system might very well end up being more interesting than the software you bought in the first place.

That's just what the World Wide Web is: more information than you could ever digest in That's just ... linked together in various ways, out there on the net, available for you to...