If you're serious about publishing on the Web, you cannot circumvent its mechanics. Learning HTML, CSS, and a little bit of JavaScript is a necessity, not a luxury. Over the years there have been many books, Web sites, and computer-based training applications that attempt to teach people how to create Web pages with HTML and CSS. O'Reilly's HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide is among the oldest extant HTML teaching materials. Unfortunately, it seems to be past its prime. The 6th edition of this classic is embarrassingly dated, offers poor advice for would-be Web designers, and in general offers absolutely nothing that you can't get for free through online XHTML and CSS sources.

Writing analysis

HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide 6th Edition starts out with an overlong history of the Internet, the World Wide Web, Web browsers, development tools, and HTML, including how the HTML standard has evolved over the years. The reference portion represents the bulk of the book, where each HTML tag is profiled with a lot of words but not enough details.

I didn't discover any language errors in this book, but I did find a number of anachronisms, the biggest being the repeated reference to Netscape Navigator as though it were still a current, popular browser that anyone used. The obsession with Netscape helps form the eerie sense that this book was not properly updated to reflect modern technology. This sentiment is solidified by the rest of the book's focus on outdated HTML standards and practices.

Putting the book to the test

When I began reading this book, I had high expectations for it. This is a well-regarded reference in its 6th edition, so it should be the best source in the industry, right? Wrong. The introductory section is terrible, the reference portion is incomplete, and the entire book -- despite being specifically updated for modern technology -- is horribly dated.

I hardly know where to begin with criticism of HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide 6th Edition, except perhaps with the overlong beginning. The authors could have conveyed the same amount of important information in less than half the words in the introductory historical chapters.

Moving on to the advice and instructions on how to use HTML tags, I was astonished to see some of the worst-written HTML I have ever seen pass as professional. The authors encourage readers not to use closing HTML tags where they are not specifically required by the old 4.01 standard, and in general ignore XHTML standards. What got me more than the fact that they say closing </p> tags are unnecessary is the fact that they insist that some modern, educated Web designers don't know that closing paragraph tags even exist! Sure, some people don't know what they are doing, have not studied modern standards, don't actually create meaningful Web pages by hand, and probably don't know that closing </p> tags make code more readable and forward compatible with the latest standard... perhaps such people even go on to write books on HTML. XHTML in essence is the new HTML standard and should be treated as such, not dismissed as some new-fangled contraption those damn kids are using these days. To design a site to the bare minimum requirements of the HTML 4.01 standard would be pure folly in this day and age.

To make matters worse, the HTML reference does not list the CSS properties of each tag -- only the old HTML 4.01 properties. That makes HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide 6th Edition effectively useless as a reference text for designing anything other than old-fashioned, hard-to-read, hard-to-maintain, tag soup HTML pages. Following that advice would make you a terrible Web designer.

Conclusions

As a Web publisher, I have dealt with XHTML and CSS every day for the past several years. I have watched it evolve from HTML to XHTML, and from sloppy "tag soup" to clean CSS. Every article I write goes directly into the Bluefish HTML editor, complete with headers, tags, and other code. I picked up my initial understanding of HTML through an old Netscape book on Web design, and later honed my skills through W3Schools, which offers free courses on XHTML, CSS, and other Web languages and technologies. Not only are the W3Schools courses better than the introductory teaching chapters in HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide 6th Edition, but the online reference is actually complete, separated by standard, and includes descriptive examples of nearly every tag. So in essence, you can get a quicker, better HTML education and tag and property reference for free on the Web than you can get from this poorly executed $33 book.

This is the worst professionally-created reference for static Web page design I have ever seen. It fails in every possible way -- it does not show best practices, is not comprehensive, is too expensive for the information it provides, and presents readers with an inaccurate portrait of modern Web page design. The reason this book gets a 3 out of 10 rating is not because it has a few redeeming qualities; it is because it could theoretically be worse.

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Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.