Essential HTML fast

A quick, concise guide to preparing a well-designed, professional web site using HTML. Using solid design principles and the full extent of the new HTML standard, users reading this book will quickly be able to design a professional-looking, easily extensible web site. Essential HTML fast is written to serve as a desktop quick-reference and will thus appeal to both business and home users, as well as students taking a course on HTML and web site design. Its logical structure allows readers to learn HTML stepwise, and to find answers to a specific problem quickly and easily. Topics covered include: how to plan your web site effectively; effective use of hypertext, images, audio and video; layout techniques using tables and list; how to use style sheets, font sizes, plans for mathematical equation mark-up and the integration of CGI scripts, Java and ActiveX. This will be essential reading for all professional developers and students wanting to learn HTML -- fast.

1 Introduction.- Why use the Web?.- Who should read this book.- Assumptions made in this book.- Things you’ll need.- How to use the book.- Some Internet and World Wide Web concepts and terms.- Clients and Servers.- IP addresses and URLs.- The Hypertext Transfer Protocol.- Browsers.- How to get the browser.- Other tools.- HTML editors.- Graphics Software.- 2 Planning and Designing Your Web Site.- Planning ahead.- A simple project plan: Wallace’s nuts, bolts and grommets.- Company background.- Define the market.- Define the mission.- Define the vision.- Define the strategy.- Analyse the business.- Starting small and working up.- Making use of Hypertext.- Designing the site.- Consistency.- Identity.- Navigation.- What makes a ‘good’ web site?.- 3 Early Html: Your First Home Page.- Getting started: the browser.- Your first home page.- Head, body and foot.- What it all means.- The HEAD and /HEAD tags.- The BODY tag.- How to do more interesting things.- Commonly used tags.- Using different sized headings; the H tags.- The P tag.- The DIV tag.- The BR tag.- The HR tag.- Structuring your documents.- Coda.- 4 Links and Hypertext.- More about Hypertext.- Creating Links.- Links to external documents.- Creating links within the same document.- The Soccer Web.- Making it into a ‘proper’ web.- Relative referencing: links to other files on your server.- Accessing other forms of information.- Coda.- 5 Logical and Physical Mark-Up.- Use Logical Mark-up!.- More logical mark-up.- CITE.- DFN.- STRONG.- CODE.- INS and DEL.- Physical Mark-up.- I and B.- TT.- BIG and SMALL.- SUB and SUP.- An example of various physical mark-up tags.- Coda.- 6 Using Images.- Using images.- GIFS, JPEGS and PNG: types of images for the web.- GIFS.- Types of GIFs.- Interlaced GIFs.- When to use GIFs.- JPEGs.- Progressive JPEGs.- When to use JPEGs.- Including images in your pages; the IMG tag.- Alternate text.- Moving your images left, right and centre.- The Align attribute.- The Height and Width attributes.- HSPACE and VSPACE.- Borders.- Client side image maps.- Creating a map using the OBJECT tag.- Button bars.- 7 Lists.- Unordered lists.- Using the type attribute.- Ordered Lists.- Attributes for Ordered Lists.- Type.- Using start and value.- The LI tag.- Setting values arbitrarily.- Nested Lists.- Unordered lists.- Ordered lists.- Definition Lists: DL, DT and DD.- 8 Forms.- Form basics.- How forms are handled: CGI.- Defining the form.- Form methods.- The GET method.- The POST method.- Sending a form through e-mail.- The INPUT tag.- Text fields.- Text Areas.- Creating Submit and Reset Buttons.- Checkboxes and radio buttons.- Radio Buttons.- Drop down menus and scrolling lists.- Drop down menus.- Scrolling List Boxes.- Coda.- 9 Frames.- Designing the Pages.- Proceed with Caution.- Frame Tags.- Frameset and its attributes.- Rows and Columns.- Nesting frames.- NORESIZE.- Scrolling frames.- Frame borders.- NOFRAMES.- Using Frames effectively.- The TARGET=“_top” attribute.- 10 Tables.- The TABLE tag.- Adding columns.- Captions.- Table headers versus data.- Borders, spacing and padding.- Adding a border.- Spacing.- Padding.- Combining all three.- More complex table layout.- Text alignment in tables.- Spanning rows and columns.- Adding colour.- Coda.- 11 Cascading Style Sheets.- Cascading Style Sheets.- Designing your site for style sheets.- How style sheets work.- Inheritance.- Context.- Multiple Selectors.- Classes.- Defining generic classes.- Pseudo-classes.- Properties.- Text properties.- The text-indent property.- The text-align property.- The line-height property.- Font properties.- Colors and background properties.- Linking your style sheets to the documents.- Including style definitions in the head of your document.- Linking the style sheets in.- Importing styles.- Why you should use style sheets.- 12 Web Technologies.- Multimedia.- Files sizes.- Plug-ins.- Helper applications.- Using the OBJECT tag to include multimedia.- The Common Gateway Interface.- Creating interactivity: programming on the web.- Perl.- Java.- JavaScript.- Web resources.- Search Engines.- The World Wide Web consortium.