Who better to ease you into the detailed world of HTML coding (where even an errant spacebar can gum up your creative masterpiece) than well-known Web design instructor Lynda Weinman and her programmer brother, William. This book's
first edition came out over 3 years ago, and the Web has changed a lot in that time. Novices will appreciate this HTML primer that not only helps in hand-coding Web pages but also in troubleshooting the HTML generated by WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors like Dreamweaver and GoLive and image/animation applications like Flash, Fireworks, Photoshop, and ImageReady.
Creative HTML Design.2 covers basic page structure, images and compression, color, links, buttons, transparency, typography, organization, style sheets, navigation, rollovers, forms, and other issues. (A good description of the first edition, including a sample chapter, can currently be found at www.lynda.com; this new edition will most likely be detailed there soon as well. They also maintain an errata section, important for any book that includes code.) Lynda Weinman's specialty is her friendly yet tech-savvy teaching style--there aren't many who can walk readers through the minutiae of client-side image map coordinates and not confuse them (or bore them to tears). Brother William[SS1], an engineer and programmer, presumably provides the finer points of HTML, plus the JavaScript and CGI scripts. The book offers all the good aspects of Weinman's other popular books: text that's affable yet clear, with a view to anticipating problems beginners may stumble into; lesson projects that are neither too complex nor aesthetically amateur; and a book layout that doesn't crowd pages, but rather serves up ministeps and clearly captioned screen shots in easily digested morsels.
With editors that do it all--like Dreamweaver and GoLive--why would a non-tech-head Web designer want to learn HTML? As Weinman explains, "The advantage of knowing and understanding HTML is that you are in better control of knowing what is possible and what is not." Even if you use an HTML editor, you will at some point have to go "under the hood" and fix troubled code, and at this point even a little familiarity can make a big difference in relieving Web design stress. --Angelynn Grant
Topics covered:
- Choosing an ISP
- Creating a basic page and uploading
- Creating graphics, including how compression works
- Web color palettes and color tags
- Links, alt text, image maps
- Background images and tiled patterns
- Custom rules, bullets, and other artwork
- Working with transparency
- Tables
- Typography and fonts
- Site planning and management
- Cascading style sheets (CSS)
- Frames
- Rollovers
- Forms
- Animation and sound
- Listing with search engines
- HTML 4.0 reference, including the finer points of "good HTML"
- CD includes all project files for sample Web site used in lessons as well as JavaScript and CGI scripts used
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