HTML4 for the World Wide Web

Based on HTML for the World Wide Web by Elizabeth Castro (978-90-430-0382-4, Pearson Education)

Introduction

I read this book in 2003 when the web was still young. I used it to teach myself html (and a little css) so that I could create my own first personal web page. I like to read so it had short summaries of books I had read, plus pictures to share with the family scattered across the globe. It was quite primitive and as I had no training in software development I was not adhering to any best practices or even following the web standards, but neither were the big players. In those days it was a challenge to make sure a site looked as intended on all browsers. Still I managed to create my own photo galleries and carrousel from scratch. If I would have started today I probably would have gone for something like bootstrap with all this functionality readily available. The original website does not exist anymore, it was hosted on a server from our telecom provider and they stopped offering that service. So I switched to WordPress at some point and used my html knowledge to centralise info at work playing around with various cms options, like WordPress and Drupal. Then came the big SharePoint wave at work which makes making a webpage with your own html very difficult. I had made a webpage with a form to collect some experimental data with the purpose to compare actual duration with predictions based on a model. I got that working with a bit of fiddling and searching on the web figuring out I needed to switch from .html to .aspx on SharePoint for example. It worked but when I wanted to update my model which was coded in Javascript, some security update had made updating my existing webpage impossible. During corona I started a new WordPress blog on WordPress.com and at the beginning of the year decided it was better to host my own site, and run a WordPress blog there. Main reason was that I wanted functionality in WordPress that was not available in my WordPress plan and to enable the features I was looking for would cost more that getting a hosting plan somewhere else. In parallel I followed a course called Web design for everybody from umich on Coursera. That got me more or less up to current on HTML 5 and CSS. It was certainly a good course but you really start to learn and explore when you do your own projects. So, on my new website I am planning to create my own custom Quizlet version. That will allow me to tweak what I want and the money I will save on the Quizlet WordPress.com subscriptions will go a long way to pay for my web hosting package. And there are more ideas percolating! I got myself a new book on HTML 5, CSS and Javascript but decided to quickly re read the old book before deciding if I could make myself chuck it. This is more a sentimental issue than a question of technical relevance of the book. Having reread the book it becomes clear how much has changed, not only standards wise but also in our approach to web development. I would not recommend this book today but at the time when things were new and hampered by many technical limitations to book served a purpose. To allow anyone to take their first steps and go out there where no one had gone before. On this page I plan to make a summary of the book and the things that are still relevant and the ones that definitely belong to the past.