Thorough Books on HTML

KrunkMcGrunk

I've gone through the HTML tutorials at HTML Dog, and I'm starting to read CSS: The Missing Manual. However, I'd like something a bit more in-depth on HTML.

HTML Dog is great for teaching the no-frills basics of HTML, but I've found that the author doesn't really explain things very deeply.

Can anyone recommend a good book on HTML?

KrunkMcGrunk

To be more precise, I'm looking for something that will give me a deeper understanding of why I should use different tags, not just when I should use them.

Jasconius

Actually the two resources you listed happen to be the best I am even aware of.

I don't know what else to tell you. CSS: Missing Manual is like.. THE book.

I think what you are trying to ask for is information on building truly semantic HTML pages. And the answer might be in just googling for building semantic HTML.

Short of that, I think you are sort of misunderstanding the nature of HTML 4. Most tags as entities are all the same husk that get different CSS properties assigned to them behind the scenes by the browsers themselves. The only thing that makes them special is their semantic meaning to certain types of parsers. Such as <strong> and <em>

You can make many tags behave like <strong> visually. <strong> only exists because it has meaning to certain programs that consume it.

onceling

This is the book we used for first year intro web design course:

http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-HTML-CSS-XHTML/dp/059610197X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1285089366&sr=8-1

I really liked the book and in my personal opinion it covered the "Why" moreso than anything I have ever read.

EWom

I have the book HTM & XHTML: The Definitive Guide 6th Edition www.oreilly.com and it seems pretty good. I'm sure they have updated versions by now

One thing you want to get in the habit of is programming for XHTML compliance, I still see a lot of people who don't do that

KrunkMcGrunk

Jasconius wrote: »

Actually the two resources you listed happen to be the best I am even aware of.

I don't know what else to tell you. CSS: Missing Manual is like.. THE book.

I think what you are trying to ask for is information on building truly semantic HTML pages. And the answer might be in just googling for building semantic HTML.

Short of that, I think you are sort of misunderstanding the nature of HTML 4. Most tags as entities are all the same husk that get different CSS properties assigned to them behind the scenes by the browsers themselves. The only thing that makes them special is their semantic meaning to certain types of parsers. Such as <strong> and <em>

You can make many tags behave like <strong> visually. <strong> only exists because it has meaning to certain programs that consume it.

HTML Dog is great, but I often find myself not understanding why some things work the way they do.

And I didn't realize that The Missing Manual had a book on HTML. I just started learning HMTL/CSS a month or so ago. That said, I really like what I've read of the CSS book thus far. I will definitely look into their HTML book.

Thanks!

e: I will take a look at that O'Reilly book for sure

Dr. Trevorkian

EWom wrote: »

One thing you want to get in the habit of is programming for XHTML compliance, I still see a lot of people who don't do that

For some of us, that's quite intentional.

http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml