Book Review - Goodies What Goodies? (htmlgoodies.com)

Member Name: zebra

Product:	htmlgoodies.com
Date:	27/10/02 (53 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You tell me!

Disadvantages: Teaches outdated HTML

If you have ever done a search on Google for HTML tutorials you will probably come across the HTML Goodies website. It is the one with an orange wavy line down the side and features a man with a beard. Well this review is about the book of the website and as far as I can see there is nothing in the book that isn't on the website.

I have been trying to teach myself how to write web pages for quite some time and I have discovered a lot of things the hard way. I have used websites like HTML goodies, followed the instructions and got results but having nearly finished my pages I discovered W3C and XHTML.

XHTML came out last year and is the latest version of HTML and the most significant difference is that it has to be written in lower case text. HTML goodies does not mention xhtml and in fact hardly mentions the different versions of HTML at all. Prior to xhtml the accepted format was HTML 4.0 and this is only given a small mention in an appendix.

Joe Burns says 'HTML is completely backwards compatable' and gives the impression that the later versions are not too important. He even suggests that 'web heads write above most heads'.

Joe Burns has built up a wide following and his tutorials have helped 'more than 1,000000 people' to learn HTML and he deserves some applause for this. However, one wonders whether his cavalier approach to more recent versions of HTML is really helping anyone.

HTML 4.0 which became the official standard way back in 1998 deprecated a few tags including CENTER and FONT - now while this may not really affect anyone for ages it seems to me that a tutorial should at least mention the alternatives and reasons when introducing these tags. But these tags are among the first you learn in the book.

Another irritating tutorial I found was chapter 7 which explains how to make a link button using the FORM command - I thought this looked quite useful until I tried it and re
alised its limitations. In that chapter there is no mention at all of the much more efficient and user friendly HTML 4.0 BUTTON command. He does give it a brief mention on page 519 when he briefly mentions HTML 4.0.

Now I am quite new to all this stuff and I find this sort of misinformation confusing and frustrating. If I buy a book to help me learn HTML in 2002 I expect it to reflect the most recent version of HTML or at the very least I would expect an explanation of the different versions. In the brief mention Burns gives to XML he says, 'the concern I see coming out of all this fancy new stuff is that it might do damage to the web'.

One has to wonder if this attitude is taken because the bulk of his website does not teach HTML 4.0 which has now been around for four years which is a very long time in the techno world, let alone take requirements of XhTML into consideration. The site gets 2 million visitors a month and brings in quite a lot of advertising revenue - he mentions just how much on p. 485.

What I find particularly frustrating is that it was tutorials like HTML goodies that actually helped get me started but later when I found out more I ended up having to completely rewrite my pages. I eventually discovered that using style sheets is far more efficient and saves time, errors and increasingly important bandwidth. As it doesn't matter whether HTML is written in upper or lower case but xthml must be written in lower case it would seem better to start people off in the habit of writing in lower case.

Having said all this it's down to you whether you want to go with the dinosaur or get started with something that at least informs you of the latest HTML. If you like the website, find it useful and only want simple pages then it is a very comprehensive book. But in my opinion it is too outdated to be of any real use and why buy a book if the same content is on the web anyway?

I'm afraid thi
s book is such a disappointment that I doubt whether I would trust another book from the same publisher either.

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