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HTML for fun and profit (signature edition)
Morris M., SunSoft Press, Mountain View, CA, 1995. Type: Book (9780132424882)
Date Reviewed: Dec 1 1996

As all the world clambers on to the Internet bandwagon and starts to put together a Web site, demand for people who can design pages, write English, and work with HTML is spreading like a forest fire. This book will not tell you much about designing pages or writing English, which are by far the more difficult of these skills, but it will tell you about HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language that provides the basis for all information on the World Wide Web.

This book is up-to-the-minute stuff. According to the front cover, it is already a “National Bestseller,” although on looking inside, it appears to have been first published in 1996. And in a curious remark at the end of the final chapter, the author opines that “things that are created on the Internet experience a very fast evolutionary rate, and WWW is not the exception. The topics listed here should be passe by 1996, and a new future as yet undreamed will be evolving.”

This seems to create a potential record for literary obsolescence. And obsolescence is already creeping in. The book is based on Mosaic as the browser of choice--it is allegedly “one of the most commonly used browsers at present.” Most people I know switched to Netscape more than a year ago (although this difference in environment did not cause me any real problems in working with the book). There is no mention of Java.

I was surprised and pleased to be given this book to review. Like many other academics, I have long been meaning to set up a Web home page that reflects my own interests--academic and otherwise--but somehow I never quite found the time. On opening this book, I knew little about HTML and was eager to learn.

The book is practical and down to earth. In a brief introduction to Internet and WWW culture, readers learn, among other things, that “one of the most significant inroads that WWW has made into the Internet culture is the HTML-ization of emoticons.…Email now uses HTML-style emoticons, for example, <smirk> and </smirk>.” The next chapter brings you back to ground level by explaining, in detail, how to set up HTTP servers for Unix, Windows, and the Macintosh. The book includes a CD-ROM that contains the appropriate code, along with a large number of HTML examples. I did not have to set up a server, so I did not examine this material in detail.

The next two chapters, on HTML basics and linking documents into a hypertext, and another on tables, contain what I really wanted to know. HTML is presented in gory detail. The book is written in a style that assumes you have a workstation right there; for example, “add <p><p> as noted in step 4 of Figure 2-3. Save and reload the image.” The presentation is slow and labored, but I found it easy to skim and extract what I wanted. Tables are always somewhat mysterious in document formatting languages, and this description of what is possible in HTML is very useful.

The rest is more esoteric. The chapter on multimedia is interesting, but it is easier to learn what is possible, and how to use it, by browsing around the Web. The Common Gateway Interface permits a Web page to access processing resources so that it can accommodate a questionnaire that is filled in by the reader, or consult a database to determine what information to display. The facilities provided are specific to the host machine (Unix, PC, or Macintosh), and although the book sets forth the various alternatives, I found it quite confusing. There are lengthy chapters on how to create forms and process information from them. The book includes a brief introduction to Perl, the language generally used for processing information from HTML documents.

The book ends with a style guide to document layout, an introduction to some tools for processing HTML-related information, and a chapter on the Netscape browser. There are numerous appendices, on installing Mosaic on various platforms, an HTML reference, a glossary, and more information on tools such as Perl and WAIS.

The writing style is rather breathless, with short paragraphs, explicit instructions that assume you are sitting at your terminal, detail piled upon detail, and a general feeling of hypertext and information rather than exposition and explanation. Admittedly, the subject is difficult, partly because it is changing rapidly and partly because it is necessary to explain how the same facility works on several different platforms, but I felt that more emphasis should have been placed on the big picture, and the details should have been relegated to tables. My advice is to read the first couple of chapters, which give all you need to know to get started. Once you can set up your own basic pages and navigate around the Web to search for good ideas, the rest is probably best learned by exploration.

I created my home page the Internet way--by browsing around and copying ideas, in the form of graphic icons and pieces of HTML formatting. This book certainly helped by kicking things off, but it seems to me that cut-and-paste is the real way to learn HTML for fun and, perhaps, profit.

Reviewer:  Ian H. Witten Review #: CR119887 (9612-0974)
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