Customer Reviews

XHTML Black Book: A Complete Guide to Mastering XHTML

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I liked the immediate solutions menu at the beginning of each chapter that list the most likely sought problems and the pages where you can find the answers. Also, the chapters on JavaScript were informative.

On the down side, why would anyone write an XHTML book w/ out concentration on cross-browser functionality? Many of the examples were solutions for just IE or for just Netscape. The whole point of validated XHTML is to reach the widest possible audience which means coding to a defined standard; browser specific code is mostly pointless. Also, as someone mentioned, the use of deprecated tags in examples caused me to be wary of the code throughout the whole book. Finally, why wait till page 503 to cover CSS? That should have been demonstrated early on to discourage the use of inline formatting within pages. And the CSS coverage, a chapter crucial to web development (ie, separation of data and presentation), was weak.

I guess for someone starting out it's ok to use this as a guide. But I urge anyone reading this book to avoid the use of deprecated tags or your web pages will render different ways in difft browsers.

I bought this book as a beginner, wanting to learn the basics of Dynamic HTML and mission accomplished! The examples are great and I know I'll be able to keep this book around as a reference for a long time.

After browsing through this book, I quickly went back and started reading it from the beginning. This is a great book for beginners in web authoring and an excellent ref. for experienced authors. As a self taught web author, I have purchased and read many books. For those just beginning, this book is worth the price. As for advanced authors, this book is a valuable ref. which includes the the newer XHTML 1.1 .. check this out. You will not be regret it. Well structured and complete and easy to read and understand. You will comprehend all that you read.

There is a very good 150 page book in here waiting to get out of this bloated expensive tome. Unfortunately, the endless padding just makes information retrieval extremely slow. Not content to show us bits of code to illustrate particular points, Holzner gives us complete pages of irrelevent mark-up almost every time. Rather than using a tabular approach to show what elements can be used with each tag, the author dribbles through the entire descriptive list in every chapter. The cardinal sin, though, is Holzners repeated use of depricated elements and tags in his illustrations. Surely a book on XHTML should show the XHTML way of doing things rather than harking back to earlier standards. Yes, I know the tags still work in most cases, but they won't for much longer and there is ALWAYS an alternative approved XHTML way of doing things. The book is also very poorly designed: symbols for the various browsers and W3C standards would have made things much clearer. A huge disappointment.

I read (or skimmed) many books looking for some understandable explanation of XHTML modularization. This book has it. When I checked who the author was, I found it was Steven Holzer, the author of the equally great Inside XML. Figures. The two best books on XML and XHTML were written by the same person.

I have had NO previous experience in IT whatsoever. The book was very simple written, step by step.
I learned the basics of XHTML very quickly. Now, I am experienced web page builder and don't write codes anymore (I use web page building Applications), but believe me, I open that book almost everyday to refresh my memory.

I have had NO previous experience in IT whatsoever. The book was very simple written, step by step.
I learned the basics of XHTML very quickly. Now, I am experienced web page builder and don't write codes anymore (I use web page building Applications), but believe me, I open that book almost everyday to refresh my memory.