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Creating Cool
Web Sites with
HTML, XHTML,
and CSS
Dave Taylor
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Creating Cool
Web Sites with
HTML, XHTML,
and CSS
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Creating Cool
Web Sites with
HTML, XHTML,
and CSS
Dave Taylor
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Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS
Published by
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
10475 Crosspoint Boulevard
Indianapolis, IN 46256
www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2004 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Control Number: 2004100892
ISBN: 0-7645-5738-6

available in electronic books.
Trademarks: Wiley, the Wiley Publishing logo and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates, in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without
written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not
associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Copyright © 1994-2003 World Wide Web Consortium (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research
Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved.
http://www.w3.org/
Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright
documents 20021231.
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About the Author
Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980, when he first logged in as an
undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego. Since then, he’s been a research
scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, reviews editor for SunWorld
magazine, and founder of four companies: The Internet Mall, iTrack.com, AnswerSquad, and
ClickThruStats.com. Currently, Dave is president of Intuitive Systems and is busy launching
an electronic book publishing company called Intuitive Press.
Dave has designed over 50 Web sites, both commercial and nonprofit, and has published
more than 1000 articles about the Internet, Unix, Macintosh, interface design, and business
topics. His books include Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther (O’Reilly), Wicked Cool Shell
Scripts (No Starch Press), Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours (Sams Publishing), and Solaris
For Dummies (Wiley Publishing).
Dave holds a master’s degree in Educational Computing from Purdue University, an M.B.A.
from the University of Baltimore, an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the
University of California at San Diego, and is an adjunct professor at the University of
Colorado, Boulder, and the University of Phoenix Online.
You can find Dave Taylor online just about any time at
http://www.intuitive.com/
, or

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Michael Trent
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To Kiana, Gareth, and Ashley, my guardian angels
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Preface
W
ho should buy this book? What’s covered? How do I read this book? Why should I
read this book? HTML? XHTML? CSS? Sheesh! Why not just use a Web page editor?
Who am I?
Welcome!
“Wow! Another Web book! What makes this one different?”
That’s a fair question. I want you to be confident that Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML,
XHTML, and CSS will meet your needs as well as provide fun and interesting reading. So
spend a minute and breeze through my preface to ensure that this is the book you seek

visit and explore.
Why Not Just Use a Web Page Builder?
If you’ve already flipped through this book to see what’s covered, you’ve seen a ton of differ­
ent sample listings with lots and lots of
<
and
>
instructions. Yet the advertisements in every
computer magazine are telling you that you don’t need to get your hands dirty with HTML
and CSS when you can use a Web page editor. So what’s the scoop?
The scoop—or the problem, really—is that every Web page editor I’ve used is designed to
create pages for a particular Web browser and has at best a limited understanding of the rich,
complex, evolving HTML language. Use Microsoft Front Page 2000, for example, and your
site will almost certainly look best in Internet Explorer (a Microsoft product).
It’s a subtle but insidious problem. One clue to this lurking problem is that surveys of Web
developers invariably demonstrate that almost all the most popular Web sites are coded by
hand, not with fancy page-building systems.
A development company that I occasionally help with online design recently sent me a plea
because they had encountered this inconsistency in browser presentation:
Dave, Help! Everything looks different in the different browsers!! This is turning
out to be a nightmare! How much effect do different browsers have on the
appearance of the site? My customer is using AOL and from the e-mail she sent
me, things are a mess. When I look at the site, it pretty much is ok. There are a
few modifications to make - font, bold - but what’s going on?
That’s one of the greatest frustrations for all Web site designers: Not only do different versions
of Web browsers support different versions of HTML and CSS, but the exact formatting that
results from a given HTML tag or CSS style varies by Web browser, too. It’s why the mantra
of all good Web designers is “test, test, test.”
In fact, if you’re going to get serious about Web development, I would suggest that you con­
sider a setup like I have: Before you officially say that you’re done with a project, check all

trouble.
Ł
Check out this icon for additional details that deserve special attention and may
note
help you work better in the long term.
Ł
Jump to the chapters elsewhere in the book that this icon points you to. You’re
x-ref
bound to run into some good information or more details about the topic at hand.
This icon points you to helpful information or samples on the companion Web site
on the
that accompanies this book (
http://www.intuitive.com/coolsites/
) or to sites
Ł
elsewhere on the Net.
web
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Ł
Preface
xiv
Who Should Read This Book?
You can use this book to learn HTML, XHTML, CSS, and the techniques needed to create
cool Web sites. All you need is a simple text editor, such as Notepad (which comes with
Windows) or TextEdit (which is part of the Macintosh operating system), and a Web browser.
If you’re already online and have a Web browser installed on your computer, you can easily
explore all the examples in this book by going to this book’s accompanying Web site at
http://www.intuitive.com/coolsites/
.
What’s on the Companion Web Site?