Audience: Web designers and IT experts actually designing, programming and maintaining web-sites, and interested in learning about web authoring techniques and best practices. No deep IT background is required to follow this technical text.

Contents & Review: This excellent book is a technical overview and discussion of web authoring and web-site design issues in detail. It covers web-site design issues for a variety of different web browsers, and displays; web design principles for printed media designers, and a good introduction on how web servers work. An entire section is devoted to html, including an overview, tags, formatting text, creating links, adding images and other page objects, tables, frames, forms and server side issues. There is a good overview on web-oriented graphics, including the GIF, the .jpg and the PNG formats and design issues with the web palette. Our attention is focused after this on multimedia and interactivity over the web, including animated GIFs, audio and video on the web, (Ed: unfortunately there is only a poor discussion on QuickTime, not covering the revolutionary ver. 4.0 release) and interactivity with Javascript. Under emerging technologies: cascading style sheets (Ed.: standard in Adobe Golive), DHTML, and an introduction to XML. Furthermore a discussion on embedded font technology and internatioanlization. (Ed.: web and voice I/O missed unfortunately).

The conclusion is that if you are interested in a good technical text that covers the additional information that is not provided in your web authoring language manuals, than this is a good reference book, despite that some aspects are a bit shallow (see comments above).

The Appendix contains a useful summary of html tags and elements, list of attributes, deprecated tags, proprietary tags and CSS compatibility.

There is also a Glossary of Terms and an Index.