The Ultimate HTML Reference

Published by: Sitepoint
ISBN: 0980285887

Reviewer Ratings

Relevance:
Readability:
Overall:

Buy it now

One Minute Bottom Line

The Ultimate HTML Reference should be on the desk of each and every web developer and designer. You never again have to wonder whether a browser supports a specific element or attribute, just page to the element, check the browser support stats, read the "fine print" and carry on with the job at hand. Not sure what the most appropriate element is to mark up a specific part of your page? Simple, the book is organized by groups of relevant elements such as Structural Elements, List Elements, Text Formatting etc. Find the group of elements that suits your needs, find an element that looks to be the one you want to use and simply read the "Use this for..." description. This book is so easy to use, a pleasure to read and a definite must have.

The Ultimate HTML Reference should be on the desk of each and every web developer and designer. You never again have to wonder whether a browser supports a specific element or attribute, just page to the element, check the browser support stats, read the "fine print" and carry on with the job at hand. Not sure what the most appropriate element is to mark up a specific part of your page? Simple, the book is organized by groups of relevant elements such as Structural Elements, List Elements, Text Formatting etc.

Find the group of elements that suits your needs, find an element that looks to be the one you want to use and simply read the "Use this for..." description. This book is so easy to use, a pleasure to read and a definite must have.

Review

Chapter 1 - HTML Concepts

In this chapter the reader is introduced to the high level aspects of the world of HTML. Topics covered include a look at the structure of a HTML document as well as the various Doctype's even going back as far as the Doctype for HTML 2.0. There is also a discussion about the three different rendering modes that browsers employ, quirks mode, standards mode and almost standards mode depending on aspects such as whether a doctype is present, whether the HTML content is valid etc. Also covered is the syntax of both HTML and XHTML, the differences between HTML and XHTML as well as the accessibility features of both HTML and XHTML.

Chapter 2 - Structural Elements

One of the important aspects of writing semantic HTML pages is to have a well and sensibly structured document. In this chapter the reader will be introduced to the various elements that allows HTML authors to create these structured documents. It covers everything from your top level <html> tag right down to the closing </body> tag. In between you will learn about what elements can be contained within the <head> and <body> sections of a HTML document, the six levels of heading (H) tags as well as the paragraph tag. Other miscellaneous items covered in this chapter are the div, break and horizontal rule tags.

Chapter 3 - Head Elements

In the previous chapter you would have learnt what elements can appear and in this chapter the author expends on those elements. Here you will also be introduced to a much lesser know element, the base element. Not used very often, it is used to define a base URL for all other links that resides within the document. With the ways in which servers works these days this tag does not have much use anymore but it makes for interesting reading nevertheless.

The rest of the elements covered are the standard tags that everyone knows and have used over and over again such as, <script>, <link>, <title> etc. One thing I need to mention here is that in the discussion of the meta element there is a very useful reference to the possible values for the http-equiv attribute of the meta element such as 'Allow', 'Content-Encoding', 'Content-Type', 'Expires' and more.

Chapter 4 - List Elements

Probably one of the most used and most useful of the HTML elements, list elements deserved a chapter of it's own. All the list types are covered here from the unordered list to the definition list. Also covered here are two deprecated list types that you probably never heard of and will never use, the dir and menu elements.

Chapter 5 - Text Formatting Elements

Even though this is one of the largest chapter in the reference, covering 45 elements, most of the elements covered in this chapter are merely included for completeness as most are either deprecated or should not be used anymore as text formatting is of a presentational nature and should therefore not be contained within your HTML but should be handled by CSS. There is however some important elements here as well, some of which are not used nearly enough or for the right purposes.

Two of these elements are the <em> (emphasize) and the <strong> elements. The idea behind these two elements is to use the emphasize element when one want to, no surprise here, add more emphasis to a word or sentence, meaning that it carries more importance then the rest of the sentence or paragraph. The strong element should be used when you want text to be displayed in a bold typeface to have it stand out from the surrounding text but not to indicate that the word or sentence carries any greater emphasis or importance. Also strong should be used over the <b> element. Besides this this chapter will also introduce the reader to some, completely unknown to me, elements such as ruby, rtc, rbc, wbr and xmp.

Chapter 6 - Form Elements

This chapter features complete coverage of all form elements including two elements some reader might not know such as isindex and optgroup used with select. Also under discussion is the whether or not to use tabindex for form elements. The consensus out there is that you should not and should rather ensure that your form is laid out in a well structured fashion that the browser can take care of the tab indexing.

Chapter 7 - Image And Media Elements

This chapter, as chapter 5, covers a few elements that are either deprecated or should no longer be used and are merely included for completeness. The main elements that readers will find of use are the image element, embed and object.

Chapter 8 - Table Elements

Now that everyone has gotten over the "Tables are Evil" stage, developers are looking at how to use tables correctly and when you do, wow, tables are much more complex then you ever thought. This chapter then covers all of those table elements everyone knows and introduces you to the ones you might not know as they did not really have any use when tables was used for layout. These are of course elements such as thead, tbody, tfoot and oh yes, the tfoot comes before the tbody. Other elements include caption and colgroup. When all these elements are used correctly the make for very accessible and useful tables to present data to a user.

Chapter 9 - Frame and Window Elements

Does anyone still use frame and frameset? Well if you do or need to find out something about these elements for a legacy system you have to maintain, you will find that information right here. Also covered in this chapter is the accompanying noframes element as well as the iframe element.

Chapter 10 - Common Attributes

In this final chapter the reader will encounter those attributes that are so common across almost all elements that, should they have been repeated for every element, this book would have given War and Peace a run for it's money :) This chapter is separated into two sections, the first deals with the core attributes such as class, lang, id, style and xml:lang. The second part deals with event attributes, those that basically trigger JavaScript scripts to execute such as onblur, onclick, onload, onkeypress, onsubmit etc.

The book concludes with three appendices covering deprecated element, proprietary and non-standard elements from the days of the browser wars as well as a very handy alphabetical element index.

(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)