When I was first approached about writing this book, I must admit that my thought was, “Another HTML book—how many do we need?” I learned HTML by experience when there was only one version of Netscape, and it had been a long time since I’d even looked at an HTML book. But after I researched the other HTML books on the market, I felt compelled to write a book that gives readers a realistic, easy-to-understand approach to learning HTML, while at the same time offering real-world practice activities and advice on related issues.

HTML: A Beginner’s Guide is that book, offering you practical tools and knowledge that can easily be applied to a variety of development situations, without the boring rhetoric or lengthy technical fluff. This book tells you what you need to know, when you need to know it. In revising this book, I again reviewed competing books to determine what readers wanted and needed in a “new” HTML book. Again and again, I saw that you wanted a book that combined HTML and cascading style sheets in a way that was easy to understand and use. Furthermore, readers clamored for a beginning-level HTML book that covered the standards-compliant way to code usable web pages. This is that book.