HTML: The Definitive Guide, 3rd edition, Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy, O'Reilly & Associates, 587pp, £25.82
Web Design in a Nutshell, Jennifer Niederst, O'Reilly & Associates, 560pp, £17.59
Web navigation designing the user experience, Jennifer Fleming, O'Reilly & Associates, 252pp, £30.53
It was one of the most suggestive phrases of 1970s news bulletins, as the superpowers fought out the Cold War by proxy all over the developing world. A bulletin noting the presence of "Cuban advisors" on one side meant that this little war was warming up and that the A-team had arrived.
These three books are the "Cuban advisors" of creating your own website; a serious asset to have on your side.
This third edition of the HTML guide has to work much harder than its predecessors. The days when all you needed to know about the hypertext markup language (HTML) used to create web pages could be carried on a quick-reference card inside the back flap of a book have long gone. Almost from the beginning, Netscape and Microsoft (the browser superpowers) began extending the HTML standard with extra tags supported by their browsers. As they slugged it out their proxies were the harassed Web designers who wanted to use the newest features but also worried about losing visitors whose browsers would not support those features.
The standards wars between the browsers ran ahead of the ability of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - whose job it is - to ratify and publish a standard for HTML. In fact, the W3C abandoned its HTML 3 standard altogether and moved on to define HTML 4. This book covers the HTML 4 tags in detail, plus some de facto and proposed standards which are already in widespread use, such as cascading style sheets, Java and Javascript, layers and multiple-column layout.
Even with the W3C setting a standard for HTML 4, life is far from simple. As the authors note: "The paradox is that the HTML 4.0 standard is not the definitive resource. There are many more features of the language in popular use by both Netscape and/or Internet Explorer than are included in this latest language standard."
They do a good job of explaining these features in detail, noting where necessary cross-browser compatibility problems. There is also advice on when as well as how to use a particular feature effectively, so the book is more than a topic-by-topic reference.
That sort of dry reference might be what is expected of Web Design in a Nutshell. It is, after all, billed as a desktop quick reference and goes beyond HTML itself to include image and sound file creation and optimisation, Dynamic HTML and Extensible Markup Language. Contrary to this expectation, there is also a considerable amount of discussion and advice packed in alongside an excellent concise reference book.
An early chapter introducing print designers to the constraints of online design is particularly good, as is the discussion of audio. The latter includes excellent advice on file formats and sizes, plus a roundup of audio-handling tools.
The third book, on Web navigation, goes even further from the "here's-how-it-works" territory of most technical books. Or rather what is most important in Fleming's book is what works for people rather than for machines.
Web-users know which sites feel right which ones don't. Some are good to visit and revisit, while others send them reaching for the "back" or the "home" buttons straight away.
Fleming says that website navigation should:
Be easily learned
Remain consistent
Provide feedback
Appear in context
Offer alternatives
Require an economy of action and time
Provide clear visual messages
Use clear and understandable labels
Be appropriate to the site's purpose
Support users' goals and behaviours
All of these are laudable goals, rather like telling someone to do good and avoid evil. The strength of the book is that it then works through these principles in practical terms, using plenty of examples, from preparation and planning through creation of the site to testing the finished navigation.
The later chapters go into more detail for the main types of website: entertainment, shopping, identity, learning, information and community sites. In each case, the particular design and navigation challenges are explored and explained.
As in all good design, the real challenge is to take great pains to make the experience seem effortless. This book can certainly help - even if that sort of subtlety is not what the Cuban advisors of the 1970s were most famous for.
fomarcaigh@irish-times.ie
The DIY webmaster series is a step-by-step guide to creating a website with free and easily avail- able tools. Previous articles are archived at: www.ireland.com/ technology/web builder.htm