Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML

Graeme Williams writes "In the past, I've written the sort of poorly-structured non-compliant web pages that can only be produced by a combination of laziness and confusion, so I'm an ideal test subject for Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, an introduction to building web pages which focuses on compliance with the most recent HTML 4.01 standard and XHTML 1.0 standard. The book starts with the simplest of web pages, and builds from there to a solid foundation for writing simple well-structured web sites. It's clear and thorough, and will be effective both for the complete beginner and in bringing stale skills up to date." Read on for the rest of Graeme's review.

Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
author	Elisabeth Freeman & Eric Freeman
pages	xxxv + 658
publisher	O'Reilly Media
rating	10
reviewer	Graeme Williams
ISBN	0-596-10197-X
summary	A clear, effective and readable explanation of standards-compliant HTML, XHTML and CSS

This is one of those cases where you can judge a book by its cover. In addition to the title and author, the cover of Head First HTML with CSS & HTML has seven tag lines, four photos and two drawings. One of the nuggets is, "A learner's guide to creating standards-based Web pages", which is a pretty good summary of the book and its intended audience.

Head First HTML is full of the sort of distractions that would normally make my skin crawl: people talking at me from the margins, mock conversations between inanimate objects (or in this case HTML tags), crosswords, quizzes and enough cute graphics to supply the kindergartens of a fair-sized city. It's clear that the authors realize that there might be some resistance to this style because they devote five pages of the introduction to explaining why they wrote the book this way – the summary of the summary is that novelty helps your brain learn. The example chapter you can download from the web site for the book is more than 50 pages, which might be enough for you to make up your own mind whether this works for you. My experience was that the method is so effective and the material so clearly presented that the issue disappeared for me after a chapter or two.

In the introduction, the authors also mention another goal: "a clean separation between the structure of your pages and the presentation of your pages". HTML or XHTML is used to provide the structure and content of a web page, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to provide the style and layout. This means that the book doesn't include many HTML elements which are now discouraged or "deprecated", such as <B> for bold, <CENTER> for centered text, or <FONT> for specifying fonts within the web page. I guess the choice between frames and CSS might be classified as a religious one. In any case, this book is about CSS and doesn't mention frames except to note their omission in the appendix.

Most of the examples are based on a fictional coffee company called Starbuzz, and their trendy competitor, the Head First Lounge. It's a great framework for building up a web site from a few linked pages to a complete CSS layout. If you've never written a web page before, the book starts at the beginning, with the simplest web page followed by links from one page to another. If, like me, you've written a handful of web pages, reviewing the material will help focus on the essentials for a clean, compliant web page. All of the example HTML, CSS and accompanying images can be downloaded from the web site for the book, which also has the completed examples online, so you can quickly review them in your browser. If you're considering buying Head First HTML, the online examples are also a great way to see the scope of the book, from the simplest example to the most sophisticated.

There are a few prerequisites for getting the most out of Head First HTML. Adobe Photoshop Elements is used to show you how to prepare images for the web. As the book says, if you don't have it, you can download a free trial from Adobe, with the small quibble that this won't work if you've already run through your free trial before starting the book.

Understandably, Head First HTML doesn't tell you everything you might ever need to know about CSS. On the other hand, you learn a whole lot about using CSS both for appearance (such as colors and borders) and layout (positioning different parts of the page such as headers and sidebars). The book is particularly good at explaining at least some of the limitations of CSS, such as the different compromises of liquid, jello and frozen layouts. It's easily enough for you to be able to continue learning or experimentation on your own. With forgivable cuteness, the book also frequently mentions the availability of other O'Reilly publications with more information, such as HTML Pocket Reference and CSS Pocket Reference.

Similarly, the book gives a clear presentation of the different ways of setting text size, but doesn't provide the last word. If you're looking for Javascript to automatically size text based on screen resolution and browser width, you'll have to look elsewhere. In fact, Javascript is one of the ten things mentioned in the appendix, "The Top Ten Topics We Didn't Cover", leaving room for Head First Javascript to be published in 2006.

The last chapter provides a brief introduction to forms, including example designs both with and without tables. The goal of the chapter is to show you how to use CSS to style and layout forms, but you can't try out a form without something on a web server to process it, so the book's web site includes a simple-back end which will "process" (really just echo) the forms which are submitted to it.

Head First HTML deserves its score of 10, but that doesn't mean every word is perfect. I wasn't comfortable with the description of CSS borders, margin and padding until I'd gone back and re-read it. And it wasn't obvious to me that the background of a margin (such as a dashed margin) is the same as that of the content area it surrounds until I'd worked through some examples on my own. But that just underlines the fact that the book is so readable that I could tell when my understanding was slipping.

While Head First HTML never claims to be a reference, information is presented very clearly. If you forget the differences between HTML and XHTML, the book's excellent summary is easy to find, and includes a discussion of the W3C HTML and XHTML validator. That said, the index is short and idiosyncratic: there is a list of page references for the Q&A sections (under T for "There are no dumb questions") but transitional HTML is indexed only under "HTML, transitional&quot, and jello, the layout, is found under "Design" but not "J" or "Layout".

I've said that I was initially very skeptical about the graphics-heavy Head First Labs house style. I'm pretty sure I've been thinking in prose all my life, but apparently verbal and graphical perception can be safely intermingled. I can't explain why, but this garden salad of words, pictures and diagrams of all kinds provides a easy-to-read and very effective introduction to a large amount of material."

---

You can purchase Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

More HTML books need to talk about CSS

I really hate it when I see an HTML book that teaches things that have been deprecated in modern HTML.

I'm actually being forced to take a class in introductory web design. The books for this class are fairly new, yes seem to be stuck in the HTML 3.x days, with font tags, bgcolor properties, and a particular emphasis on the 216 (215?) web-safe colors.

I wish books like this one were used instead. Teaching the right way the first time is so much easier than having to tell someone that everything they learned was wrong.

Re:More HTML books need to talk about CSS

I agree. I work quite a bit with students who've just been taught HTML by their schools and they really are taught nothing about CSS. These are comp sci and graphic arts students for which web developing is a major job skill and they know next to nothing about CSS. They certainly aren't being taught to do anything advanced and most still use out-dated HTML when CSS would work better. A lot of things I do all the time they simply think you can't do. Pretty limiting.

Re:More HTML books need to talk about CSS

HTML works very well in HTML, too, although I've found that Java seems to have trouble with Java ... so watch out for that.

Re:More HTML books need to talk about CSS

If you want to do anything besides change your font color with CSS then IE has severe bugs. It certainly makes it hard to place blocks in the right places and at times impossible to get the same effect in IE that you can in Firefox or Safari. About the best you can do is find a workable half-assed solution for IE that leaves 70% of your site's users unable to experience the site in the most effective way. IE7 does seem to fix some of the bugs but not all of them which leaves me having to support yet another half-assed variant as IE7 once again isn't standards complaint in even the important elements of CSS2 but also doesn't render pages the way IE6 does. That'd be less of a problem if they'd release IE7 for older versions of Windows but as they don't plan to that means we'll be supporting IE6 for years too.

No work around is easy. On a site with 50 different elements if it takes me ten minutes per element to figure out a work around I just spent 500 minutes making the site work in IE. That's pretty much a whole work day. If I have to do that for IE6 and IE7 now that means two work days. That is best case scenario too. Now and then I find an issue with IE that in itself takes me an entire day to work around. I'd say that for every website I produce I spend around a week just finding issues with non compliant browsers and finding work arounds. So figure it costs about $1200 per website to fix these problems. That is a lot of money when you figure I produce a dozen or more websites a year. Let's just say that in my work alone $15,000 a year is spent fixing problems with IE and that still doesn't make the websites look as good in IE as they do in Safari and Firefox. IE nearly doubles the amount of time it takes me to make a static website.

Uh-oh!

Most of the examples are based on a fictional coffee company called Starbuzz

Can somebody say lawsuit?

As to the book itself, I looked at the sample chapter and it's in the random, jumpy style that marks the modern MTV generation. It has some appeal, but I think trying to get through a whole book laid out like that is going to cause headaches. Still, I plan to buy it, just to see if I can learn anything new.

Re:Uh-oh!

As to the book itself, I looked at the sample chapter and it's in the random, jumpy style that marks the modern MTV generation.

That's what I thought, too, until I read the preface to Head First Design Patterns. Turns out that the pictures, humor, etc., have actually been proven to improve learning and retention.

Re:Uh-oh!

Turns out that the pictures, humor, etc., have actually been proven to improve learning and retention.

As someone who has read several in the "Head First" series, this is definitely true in my experience. Most books are designed to cover a subject with little emphasis on teaching it. Head First books are designed specifically to teach you, and they go to great effort to do so. Think about it: do you retain more per hour spent watching the History Channel, or reading a dry all-text history text-book? Remember, the book can take dozens of hours to read. The text-book may provide more complete content, but that doesn't matter much if you've forgotten much of it within a few months.

You will remember what a Head First book teaches you, and you won't need the book as a reference like most text-books.

If the grandparent wants to stick to all-text, old-world books, he can go right ahead. But he should try a "Head First" book before he criticizes it.

As for his reference to the MTV generation, that is simply misplaced. Children and young adults have despised reading boring text books since the invention of the alphabet. Don't let nostalgia The difference is that today they cannot live a high quality life without knowledge. I, for one, commend innovators like Bert Bates and Kathy Sierra for making sure that there are better options for learning that is rewarding for people of nearly all ages.

HTML is passe

HTML has got serious faults - the major one being the softwares unable to harvest the data inteligently from the web page created using HTML. This was IMHO why a new standard (much more strict) based on XML was developed which is called XHTML.

I think any book that teaches CSS and XHTML more than HTML will be widely embraced by the programming community.

Re:HTML is passe

You are thinking of the semantic web [w3.org], which is XML based; however, XHTML is not inherently semantic, just easily-parsed.

Re:HTML is passe

Yeah, right. We've been hearing about how we should all be using XHTML and XML for ages. And yet... the web is still running on HTML 4.01.

Now, I suppose you could blame Internet Explorer for not properly supporting XHTML (it treats it as XML and displays the DOM if you try and do it properly, serving XHTML as "text/html" is wrong and broken). I haven't actually checked to see if the new IE7 supports XHTML properly, but, even if it does, XHTML doesn't really solve anything. It doesn't make data mining any easier. It's just HTML with end tags required.

What's really interesting, IMHO, is CSS3 and XML. You can style XML documents with CSS, which means you could conceivably have a document that describes the contents of the page in a fairly "semantic" manner (I think someone just won Buzzword Bingo here) and then is styled based on CSS for proper display.

You can already do something like that with XSLT, but XSLT has never seemed to really catch on, possibly because it's fairly complicated. With XML and CSS, it uses essentially the exact same semantics that HTML and CSS do (other than having no defaults), and you can apply most of the same styling knowledge from using CSS with HTML to using CSS with XML. The Content Creation section of CSS3 offers some really interesting possibilities.

Of course, without Internet Explorer support, this is basically useless, but it's still something that's fun to play around with, if not practical. But it does mean that we're still going to be using an HTML-based web for the forseeable future.

Re:HTML is passe

Yeah, right. We've been hearing about how we should all be using XHTML and XML for ages. And yet... the web is still running on HTML 4.01.

I think that if you look a little closer, you'll find that the web isn't "running on" XHTML or HTML 4.01, but rather a bizarre concoction of tag soup that happens to make popular browsers behave a certain way.

serving XHTML as "text/html" is wrong

Perhaps according to you, but not according to RFC 2854 [ietf.org], which defines the text/html media type.

I haven't actually checked to see if the new IE7 supports XHTML properly

It doesn't.

XHTML doesn't really solve anything.

It doesn't so long as it's a minority. When the overwhelming majority of the web uses XHTML, its draconian error handling that it inherits from XML will simplify browsers considerably. This has already happened to a certain extent with the mobile web.

You can style XML documents with CSS, which means you could conceivably have a document that describes the contents of the page in a fairly "semantic" manner

That's completely wrong. Sure, you could make up your own semantics that you associate with the element types you use in your ad-hoc XML format, but nobody else would know about those semantics. That's why you use a common, specified XML format... like... XHTML, where the semantics are understood.

XML isn't a super-format that magically gives you semantics. XML solves the syntax problem and stays well away from the semantics problem. Semantics are addressed at a higher level.

With XML and CSS, it uses essentially the exact same semantics that HTML and CSS do

Generic XML has essentially no semantics whatsoever. It certainly doesn't have the same semantics as HTML.

This book can't be good...

This book can never be any good! Everyone knows <html> comes before <head>!

Head First!

While I haven't read this particular Head First book, I have nothing but praise for the rest of the series.

The 'Learner's Guide' is exactly right; they explain everything they do clearly, they make the examples and exercises fun and easy to understand, not only on what to do, but why to do it. The books are graphically appealing and funny (and it's not just nerd humor), which makes them easy to read, but at the same time they don't sacrifice information, or simplify it beyond understanding.

Sight unseen, I would recommend this book, the same way I do their other ones.

choice between frames and CSS?

I guess the choice between frames and CSS might be classified as a religious one.

eh? It's perfectly possible to use both. They don't exclude each other.

Head First doesn't cut it

I bought a head first serious Java book on recommendation of one of my instructors a while ago. I ordered it online, and as soon as it arrived and I cracked the cover I regretted my decision. The style tries to be cute and 'cool', but is really very annoying and uninformative instead. I assume this trend holds true for the rest of the 'head first' series of books. Its not a series that I will be purchasing again to say the least. ;)

Amazon has it for $23.07

Amazon [amazon.com] has it cheaper than BN. ($23.07 vs $27.96)

Re:Amazon has it for $23.07

I counter with Buy.com for $20.76 [buy.com]

Great! This is EXACTLY what I need!

A book that is already out of date the day it was printed.

WHY do people bother putting these out? A waste of paper AND money. Sorry, I just can;t see this being a worthwhile book to get.

You mean "laziness and ColdFusion"

non-compliant web pages that can only be produced by a combination of laziness and confusion

...here at my job it's mostly a combination of laziness and ColdFusion.

Designing With Web Standards

Skip the review. Read Zeldman's awesome Designing With Web Standards. [zeldman.com] It will change your life. At least until you read the next life changing book.

Zeldman is also teaming up with Eric Meyers, the CSS God for An Event Apart. [aneventapart.com]

Re:Designing With Web Standards

These are both very good books but they address two different audiences. Zeldman's book, which I've just finished reading for second time, is for more advanced html authors/designers. It addresses people who have been through the trials of browser incompatibilities and are looking for something better. As I said I think it's excellent. And his alistapart site shows just what great web design can be done using web standards.

But this book is for beginners. I just finished reading it. I didn't learn a whole lot but I did pick up a few things I had either never known or forgotten about. I may give this book to my wife who'd like to write some pages for herself. She's a complete neophyte. But I think this book is really geared to people like her. I believe one of the blurbs on the book talks about how refreshing it is to see a book that will start off new html/css authors with a foundation in standards. That I think is the real appeal of the book. It shows beginning authors how to use html/css using standards. And it does it in an entertaining and instructive way.

I wasn't particularly fond of Head First Java but I love Head First Servlets and JSP. The humor in this is quite a bit tamer but it's still a very good book for someone either just beginning html/css or looking for a basic review.

Don't write XHTML - stick to HTML!

Or at least, don't write XHTML unless you really know what you're doing, and know to send real XHTML (application/xhtml+xml) to compliant browsers.)

Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful [hixie.ch]. (Written by Ian Hickson, who's an editor of half a dozen CSS drafts, QA person for Mozilla, ex-QA for Opera, and nowadays works on 'HTML 5' (WHATWG web apps) for Google.)

Poorly-structured non-compliance laziness

In the past, I've written the sort of poorly-structured non-compliant web pages that can only be produced by a combination of laziness and confusion

Wait a minute, were you copying my style!?! [gmu.edu]

IMHO a MUCH better CSS/XHTML book...

Designing With Web Standards [zeldman.com] by Jeffrey Zeldman [zeldman.com].

And it's cheaper [amazon.com] .

Other markups

Given that the market at the moment is trying to squeeze as much functionality out of existing technologies and the increasing use of new markup languages such as SVG and MathML, I would have thought that more and more books would start teaching XHTML/CSS.

XHTML will allow far better flexibility when adding in new functionality provided by new markup languages as well as better machine readability for the purposes of migrating pages at a later date. Tools to assist in developing syntactically valid XHTML pages are easily available and easy to use (such as Firefox's Validator tool as well as the old trusty http://validator.w3.org/ [w3.org]), so the argument that novices may break XHTML pages by not writing valid code is not as potent as it once was.

The challenge now lies in teaching students to write semantically correct markup. This cannot be checked by a validator or any other machine tool, as semantically incorrect markup may still follow the rules of syntax. However, it can break a braille browser or a mobile device that degrades pages' layout for the purposes of displaying it on a small screen, rendering the information inaccessible to users of these devices.

XHTML's stricter syntax far more strongly encourages users to think in terms of content/presentation rather than just writing a blob of HTML to show a nicely formatted essay/blog/gallery. The more information is both syntactically and semantically correct, the more the web will be a friendly place for users of devices other than PCs, or users who are accessing the web from a device designed to aid a disability.

It is for these reasons, forward compatibility and accessibility, that I think that XHTML should start being taught. I always hear it argued, when I recommend XHTML to a would-be developer, that "XHTML is not understood" and "it breaks pages if used incorrectly". Well, help users to understand, and teach them to use it correctly.

I'm halfway through this book right now.

I bought this book with the intention of reteaching myself the "right way" to do web design. I've used CSS for a few years now, but I've never gone the full 9 yards and completely separated all my markup from all my presentation. I always had the occasional deprecated HTML tag in there because it was what I was used to.

After seeing the impressive amount of control you get from moving away from tables and tags to nothing but XHTML and CSS I was ready to make the jump.

The first half of this book won't be anything new to most people, but in the 2nd half of the book I've never seen the box model, div layout, and css explained so clearly. It's made adjusting my web design skills much much easier.

Highly recommended.

great book

i actually bought this book, its very good as a reference

i love all "Head First .." series books

Reviewerwho?

I guess the choice between frames and CSS might be classified as a religious one.

Choice between WHAT? I think you mean between CSS and tables. Or CSS+XHTML vs. Whatever HTML-like Syntax Works.

But really, there is no need to choose. I use the deprecated b tag all the time, because it is SIMPLE, love to use tables, because they WORK for displaying on various screen sizes, plus (gasp) deploy the font tag from time to time for quick prototypes. And, guess what? I also use CSS. Fact is, Firefox and IE support CSS alongside HTML elements. And so the standards.

I could care less about what is "deprecated" by W3C, as though they are going to come over and scold me, and as though I would care.

too much typing

XHTML and CSS simply aren't very good for entering manually; only total gearheads would think that XHTML is an improvement over HTML (it's an improvement only in that it is better defined).

So, just use one of the many tools like Textile, or use a WYSIWYG editor.

out dated

you know what would be great. if a book review was on a book that coverd current standards, not a book that covered standards form 3 years ago. we are now looking ate XHTML 2.0 and CSS 3. media types are the shit! Sanguis

The b-is-deprecated myth

<b> is not deprecated. Everyone thinks it is for some reason.
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/abstract _modules.html#s_presentationmodule [w3.org]

CSS has to improve

XHTML and CSS are the way to go, but CSS definitely has to improve. Designing a liquid two-column with header and footer layout using CSS is a nightmare, especially if you have to support several browsers. Doing the same thing with a simple table is much more simple.
Just having the footer at the bottom of the page, and not just behind the body is (AFAIK) impossible with CSS.
The easiest solution is often to go with fixed size and absolutely positioned divs, but then you reduce the accessibility of the page (if you change the font size, the div doesn't become larger). Once again, these problems don't exist with table layouts.
IMHO, CSS has failed in the areas of layout, size and positioning.

This book is not up to the standard of the series

Hate to rain on the parade here, but I have both Head First Java (EXCELLENT) and Head First Design Patterns (also EXCELLENT) and this book.

IMO, this book is not even close to the other two. The other two have a nice flow, while this book feels jumpy and cobled together. It's like the other with the fun sidebars and graphics, but just not as well done. I'd like to offer some specifics but the book is on the shelf in my office and I'm home - I just know I wasn't impressed with it like the other two. I literally read the other two cover to cover, this one was worth a couple of chapters at best.

Re:The simplest standards compliant webpage EVAR

*sigh* if you would READ the minimum for a compliant webpage you would know it contains a DOCTYPE, then the etc crap...

Re:I still don't like CSS standards

Really? So far, in my admittedly limited trials, I've found IE to be the browser I have the most compliance issues with. I guess it depends on what is being done.

Re:The simplest standards compliant webpage EVAR

Actually, the only required tag is <title>. Everything else is optional, and implied. Note that this is only in HTML 4.01, I think the major structural tags (<html><head><body>) are required in XHTML. Also, the <doctype> declaration is technically required for SGML derivatives, but not strictly part of the HTML/XHTML language.

Re:The simplest standards compliant webpage EVAR

What version? The simplest HTML 4.01 document can omit the <html> tags entirely. The only required element that doesn't have optional start and end tags is the <title> element. Furthermore, if you don't care about browser compatibility, you can even use shorthand notation to reduce the document to:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<title/He llo, World!/

The validator chokes on it, but I believe that's a bug in the validator, at least for Transitional (Strict requires at least one child for BODY, but Transitional doesn't).

Re:I still don't like CSS standards

That's probably because you design the whole thing, checking it regularly in IE, then when it's all done check it in Firefox and don't like what you see.

In reality, FF has way better adherence to CSS standards than IE does. IE is crap. Intentionally broken crap. 5 years outdated, full of holes crap.

Re:I still don't like CSS standards

Last time i checked, IE does NOT cope correctly with for example the ACID2-test [http://webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html#top [webstandards.org]]. For example the default browser on the mac, Safari, is one of the few browsers that actually does.

Re:I still don't like CSS standards

Well, part of the reason that alot of layouts are broken is because Mozilla and its Ilk put the remainder margin space (if you give a non equally divisible value) on the bottom of an element. IE puts it on the top. This may not seem like much, but it will wreak havoc on your layouts when your Margins collapse.

I'm not sure placement of the remainder is layed out in the standard, but I may be wrong.

Oh, and you should build for Mozilla and then fix IE, it's hella easier to do it that way than the other way around.

It's a JOKE, you silly people!

Geeeeze! Quit waving your arms around and spitting!

Re:if (HTML_can_be_found_online) {then = save_ur_$

The key to understanding the market for techincal books is to realize that not everyone's time is equally valuable. You are quite correct in your assertion that all of the raw information in the book can be found on the Web for free with a few search sessions and some digging through the trash...and the web is full of bad advice and just plain wrong information, especially when it comes to web design and development where many people have conflicting opinions which they recite as factual information. That having been said the value in the technical book comes in the order and presentation of the materials, the expert (usually) peer reviewed suggestions and best practices, and the aggregation of various sources into one coherent work. All of this could be learned without spending you hard earned money by doing enough searching, digging, and reading on the web, but at the end of the day who do you want to trust....user99 the phat html h4x0|2s...or the somewhat more credible authors of these books...that and the main point which was how much is your time worth?

Re:if (HTML_can_be_found_online) {then = save_ur_$

The book is about XHTML and CSS, but since you apparently don't read many books, you wouldn't know that.

I thought the book was one of the most successful teaching tools I've read in years. There's a world of difference between Googling for bits of reference material, and reading a 400-page narrative built by people who know how to teach.

Reading reference material is not learning.