Your corporate Web site…to you - an investment – and being such, you didn’t let the CEO’s nephew design it. You issued an RFP; you went through a formal vendor selection process; and then you hired a professional firm to ensure that your corporate site (often the first impression of your business) was both useful and usable, separating form and function from presentation and style. A real A+ job. And now that you’ve built it, they will come. Right? Wrong.

Web design must mature and accept the developments of the past several years, abandon the exclusionary attitudes formed in the rough and tumble dotcom era, realize the coming future of a wide variety of devices and platforms, and separate semantic markup from presentation logic and behavior.

The average reader — one not raised by wolves, or, worse, by rabid advocates of Standard Generalized Markup Language during the heyday of SGML — may not clearly understand the concepts of Semantics, Structure, Markup, Content, Style, Transformation, and Presentation. Heck, I'm not sure many of us did back then either, but we've had a few years to think about it. 

Special Edition Using HTML & XHTML is a comprehensive Web publishing reference, providing practical solutions to real-world Web development problems. Author Molly Holzschlag starts by explaining how XHTML differs from HTML and why it's necessary, but quickly moves beyond a mere comparison of the differences. The reader learns which tools are best, how to code HTML & XHTML, and the basic principles of Web publishing and graphic design. The book also shows how to integrate graphics, stylesheets, frames and multimedia into XHTML Web pages. Later chapters cover XHTML's relationship to XML and creating content for alternative devices including pagers, cell phones, and hand held devices.

In the end, I pointed out that no matter how you feel about JavaScript, it looks like it's here to stay. And in my opinion, that's not a bad thing at all. But for those of you who may have long ago written off JavaScript as a toy, perhaps it will take a bit more convincing. So, let's dig in and find out why you might have done so, and what can be done to overcome your misbegotten prejudices. 

Even though I've been back from South by Southwest for days now, a few themes from the conference still haunt me. 

The other day at the local library, I was standing next to a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, as I am wont to do, sneaking drags off unfiltered Gitanes and trying simultaneously to look pained, intriguing, and authoritative. Another presumed lover of language, also standing next to the dictionary, suddenly turned and asked me to define a word for him. The word itself is not important. Puzzled and flustered — nay, incredulous — I replied, "Why don't you look it up? You're standing right next to a dictionary!"

XML looks to be a big advancement over HTML. As St. Laurent writes, "Using XML requires a different focus, demanding that designers examine the way that their documents are built rather than the way they are formatted." Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 already offers some support for XML, and Netscape 5.0 will support XML. This book is geared to the HTML developer who wants to move to the next level of web design and not wait for Microsoft or Netscape to develop the tags and style support they need. A primer rather than a complete guide to XML, this is a great starting point.

Not since Java has a new language turned so many heads in the Web community. Why is XML generating so much buzz? It offers greater flexibility and control when creating Web documents for one. If HTML doesnt have the tags you need, for example, make your own with XML. And thats just the beginning of what this powerful metamarkup language can do.

In XML: Extensible Markup Language, renowned author and programming guru Elliotte Rusty Harold combines clear, concise explanations with practical real-world examples to give you a complete understanding of XML. You get expert advice on creating XML documents, step-by-step instructions for adding customized structure to documents, tips for converting HTML to XML, strategies for assembling documents from multiple data sources, in-depth coverage of international scripts, character sets, fonts, and Unicode, thorough analysis of Xlinks and Xpointers, and much more.

The CD-ROM that accompanies XML: Extensible Markup Language features the source code for all the samples in the book as well as copies of Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Communicator.