What's Changed in the Sixth Edition

The first edition of this book, published in 1996, had 11 chapters, 2 appendices, and just 176 pages. The sixth edition in your hands has 25 chapters, 6 appendices and more than 450 pages. This book has expanded and adapted as (X)HTML and CSS have grown and changed.

What's new

The curious thing this time around is that (X)HTML and CSS have not changed considerably since the last edition. That does not mean, however that the book is just a rehashing of that earlier edition, because indeed the Web itself has changed dramatically. In the three short years since the Fifth Edition, we have seen a maturing of CSS layout techniques, which we'll explore with brand new code examples in particular in Chapter 11 but throughout the CSS chapters in general, a surge in Web pages being rewritten with CSS in order to be viewed in handhelds and mobile telephones (Chapter 13), the move away from Perl/CGI in favor of PHP along with CSS formatting of form elements (Chapter 17), a veritable explosion of audio and video, which I'll help you deal with in Chapter 18, and a move toward frequently updated blogs which has led to syndication, RSS feeds, and podcasting, which we'll tackle in Chapter 25.

And although many of the other chapters have the same titles, all have been completely updated to reflect the latest browsers, the most standard XHTML and CSS techniques, and the fact that the book is now printed in glorious full color!

Internet Explorer 7 Internet Explorer 7 was still in beta as this book went to press, and so the illustrations that show Internet Explorer 7 are actually Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 and beta 3. It is possible, though unlikely, that the display of (X)HTML and CSS will change slightly when the final program is released.

What's gone

Finally, I also made the difficult decision to completely remove four chapters. These are the chapters from the Fifth Edition on frames, WML (which has been supplanted by XHTML+CSS), and the two Old Way chapters on deprecated and little used formatting tags, and deprecated and even less used layout tags.

Although most of the elements described in those chapters are still considered valid though deprecated (X)HTML, they have fallen so far out of favor that few self-respecting Web page creators would touch them. I suggest you avoid them as well. However, for historical reasons as well as for completeness (perhaps you'll meet them somewhere and need to know how they work), I will make those chapters available on my Web site for download as a PDF. You can find them at http://www.cookwood.com/html6ed/oldway. The user name is oldway, and the password is di7nosaur.