- ISBN13: 9780596805869
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
After years of using spacer GIFs, layers of nested tables, and other improvised solutions for building your web sites, getting used to the more stringent standards-compliant design can be intimidating. HTML and XHTML Pocket Reference is the perfect little guide when you need answers immediately.
Jennifer Niederst-Robbins, author Web Design in a Nutshell, has revised and updated the fourth edition of this pocket guide by taking the top 20% of vital reference information from her Nutshell book, augmenting it judiciously, cross-referencing everything, and organizing it according to the most common needs of web developers. The result is a handy book that offers the bare essentials on web standards in a small, concise format that you can use carry anywhere for quick reference.
HTML and XHTML Pocket Reference features easily-to-find listings of every HTML and XHTML tag, and every Cascading Style Sheet value. It's an indispensable reference for any serious web designer, author, or programmer who needs a fast on-the-job resource when working with established web standards.
HTML & XHTML Pocket Reference: Quick, Comprehensive, Indispensible
Tags: HTML, Mark, Quick, Web, Jennifer Niederst-, cascading style sheet
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
This pocket reference is not recommended for HTML newbies. Instead, it is for those who are already familiar with XHTML and HTML and just need the facts in a concise format for quick reference. Particularly commendable is that any time a shorthand name for a technology is used, DTD for example, that term is defined completely so that you don’t have to go back and forth among several references to look up all associated terminology. It has been four years since a new edition of “HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide” was published, and this little guide does a good job of showing what has changed over the last few years. I recommend it for all who want to keep up-to-date with HTML and XHTML without buying yet another 400 page book. Amazon does not show the table of contents, so I do that here.
HTML & XHTML FUNDAMENTALS
How XHTML Differs from HTML
Three Versions of (X)HTML
Minimal Document Structure
DOCTYPEs for Available DTDs
ALPHABETIC LIST OF ELEMENTS
Common Attributes and Events
(X)HTML Elements
CHARACTER ENTITIES
ASCII Character Set
Nonstandard Entities (,-Y)
Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
Latin Extended-A
Latin Extended-B
Spacing Modifier Letters
Greek
General Punctuation
Letter-like Symbols
Arrows
Mathematical Operators
Miscellaneous Technical Symbols
Geometric Shapes
Miscellaneous Symbols
SPECIFYING COLORS
RGB Values
Standard Color Names
My bookshelf at work just got about five pounds lighter with the addition of this book… HTML & XHTML Pocket Reference (3rd Edition) by Jennifer Niederst Robbins.
Contents: HTML and XHTML Fundamentals; Alphabetical List of Elements; Character Entities; Specifying Color
This is a great pocket guide, and exactly what I look for in this type of book. No fluff, just well-documented information that’s easy to find, with a small number of examples to show you the format. I really appreciated the documentation on which elements and parameters are deprecated. This comes in really handy if you’re looking to code strict XHTML, but you’re unsure as to whether a certain feature is going to be supported or not. In most cases, I know the general tag I want to use, but I might be a bit confused as to the exact format of the different arguments. With the pocket guide, I can find that tag in seconds, see the options, and move on. I love it.
The book I’ve been keeping on my shelf at work for HTML reference is one of those five pound doorstops that covers absolutely everything. The problem is that I have to check the index to find what I need, and I end up using a different book for CSS information. With this pocket guide, I can retire that book, gain more room for other titles, and give my poor shelf a bit of a rest…
Large books, by their very nature, can have good points and bad points. After all, if you have a couple or several hundred pages worth of material, you are bound to get some things right and some things wrong.
But these pocket reference books from O’Reilly are great. They aren’t for learning, rather they are what they say they are: a pocket reference. (Nice to see some truth in advertising for a change.)
If you buy this book you will use it. A lot. Period.
I’m a big fan of the O’Reilly Pocket Reference series, but this one was a bit disappointing. While the basic content is there, the book is less than 100 pages and seems to only be a wrapper for three tables defining the common elements, character entities, and colors. Only the first five pages attempt to provide any foundation for the tables. Missing are more general references on forms, tables, scripting or even techniques for relative/absolute addressing. Probably most surprising was the lack of an index. For a pocket reference, that seems a pretty major oversight.
What kind of a reference book doesn’t have an index? Sure, the tag reference is in alphabetical order, but that only helps if you remember what the tag is. Also, I had a brain fart this morning and couldn’t remember the exact syntax for a comment (I work with way too many languages)- couldn’t find it. That’s what a pocket reference is supposed to be for, the little things you can’t remember!
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