HTML & XHTML the Definitive Guide
Do you have lots of antiquated web pages that were written by other people that you now need to rewrite for modern browsers? This book describes not only the standard (X)HTML tags but also includes all of the deprecated, obsolete, antiquated, and proprietary tags as well to help you find out what all that garbage people used to put in their web pages was for
My Rating: 
Pros
- Covers all past and present (X)HTML tags and attributes including proprietary tags
- Complete copy of the HTML and XHTML transitional DTDs
Cons
- Not very clear as to which attributes have been deprecated.
- Tags/attributes that you should use to write your page jumbled up with the huge number that are deprecated/obsolete/proprietary making it difficult to tell which are which
- Sections on stylesheets and Javascript contain lots of outdated info not relevant to (X)HTML
Description
- Sixth Edition: Copyright October 2006
- 654 page paperback
- Published by O'Reilly Media
- ISBN 0-596-52732-2
- Authors Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy
Review
Ever wondered what a particular obscure tag or attribute that someone used in their web page was intended to do? This book will provide the answer. Along with those tags and attributes that form part of the current (X)HTML standards this book also includes info on almost every tag and attribute that has ever been recognised by any of the commonly used web browsers. Unfortunately with the exception of antiquated tags (only recognised by long dead web browsers) all of the other tag and attribute information are all jumbled together. Certainly the tags are all labelled as to which are standard, deprecated (marked for deletion in future standards), obsolete (only found in past versions of the standards but still supported) and proprietary (cnot part of the standards but recognised by particular browsers) but these markings are not always obvious and in many cases the attributes that can be attached to the tags are not so marked.
This book also includes short sections on stylesheets and Javascript even though they have little to do with HTML and the content of those sections demonstrates that the authors are lacking in knowledge in those areas - for example they present a workaround for attaching two classes to the same tag by using the id in an invalid way to attach the second one where the standards alliow you to attach a million classes with the one class attribute if you really want to.
This book is an excellent resource for finding out what some obscure tag or attribute was originally intended to do so that you can then use your HTML/CSS standards reference to determine the correct way to code it for modern browsers to see the same effect. The way that the standard tags and attributes are lost in a maze of these outdated tags and attributes makes the book more difficult that it should be to find the standard way that it should be coded. This book is definitely not one for newcomers to HTML or people wanting a simple reference to the standard HTML tags and attributes.
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