HTML: The Complete Reference

by Thomas A. Powell
(2nd. Edition)*
Osborne: £31.99
ISBN 0-07-211977-2

My copy of this tome — it runs to 1130 pages — is getting close to falling apart, which should tell you something about how useful it is. This reference book is exactly what it says: a source of as much information as you could possibly want about HTML up to version 4, with details on the use of every tag. There is also a lot of information on the use of style sheets, basic use of forms, and including other media types on your pages, as well as introductions to scripting, DHTML and XML.

Despite its primary function as a reference book, many of the sections repay being read through, and give a good understanding of how HTML works — as well as some of the problems that can crop up. Unlike a lot of books on the market, this one does not make any assumptions about the browser being used, although it only covers up to versions 4 of Netscape and IE.

In the reference sections (appendices, making up about a third of the book), detailing the various attributes of each tag, it clearly shows which of the main browsers support which features, and gives useful notes on usage. Also in the appendices are lists of character entities — how to produce special characters like é, ’, â, and so on — plus information on fonts available on different systems, colour names and hexadecimal codes and more.

Bizarrely, I have seen someone comment on this book to the effect that there was too much information in it. The whole point of a reference book is to be as comprehensive as possible! Few things are as galling as to spend £30–£50 on a book only to find that you already know most of it and the stuff you really need to find out about is covered at a much too simplistic level. Not a problem with this book.

Do you need this book, though? Isn’t all this information available on the Web? Yes, it is — although not necessarily in one place. However, although the information is there, it is not necessarily the most convenient place to to look something up if you are actually writing a web page or two. A book open on your desk, however, can be referred to as you type the HTML.

If there is a flaw in this book, it is in its coverage of things like JavaScript, DHTML and XML, barely a dip of the toe in the water. However, they are icing on the cake: this book is about HTML, and it covers it superbly. Get this and you won’t need another reference… until the next standards change works its way into the browsers.

The third edition of HTML: The Complete Reference has now been published (ISBN: 0072129514), with information on XHTML 1.0 and more detail on CSS.