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The flight of the URLs

Creating Web Pages for Dummies by Bud Smith & Arthur Bebak IDG Books, £2& 99 in UK SO YOU want to create your own Web…

By MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
Mon Aug 12 1996 - 01:00

Creating Web Pages for Dummies by Bud Smith & Arthur Bebak IDG Books, £2& 99 in UK SO YOU want to create your own Web pages? There are courses, of course. Or you could do it the hard way and teach yourself by clicking on the view source" option in your Web browser, and then trying to decipher the raw language of Web documents, and the mysteries of HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Or you could pick up tips and tutorials from the many Web pages devoted to the subject one good starting point is Yahoo's index, at the enormously long address of http://www.yahoo.com/ ComputersYand_Internet/Software/Data_Formats/HTML/Guides_and_Tutorials /.

Or then again you could always buy a book.

At the populist end of the scale is this Dummies guide - joky clearly written and fat (44 pages). But vast chunks of it are irrelevant, such as sections on US Web service providers. It's also almost totally aimed at people who want to farm out their pages, or otherwise avoid dirtying their hands with "pure" HTML.

Apart from some useful appendices, only one chapter is about HTML per se (titled, appropriately enough, "Just Enough HTML"), while almost four times as many pages - six chapters - are devoted to particular HTML tools such as PageMill and BBEdit, some of which are also on an accompanying CDRom for Mac/PC users.

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The book is novice friendly, but beware of a few silly clangers. For example, the "mailto:" tag - surely a key feature of many Web pages - is mentioned only once, and there's not one mistake but two in the example

On the other hand, it is clearly laid out, with a classy look and step by step illustrations. The emphasis is on Web page design - Niederst's impressive portfolio includes building the Global Network Navigator site back in 1993 - with excellent tips on creating and handling graphics. She stresses testing, keeping the lowest common denominator in mind, and other "new considerations for a new medium".

Far from being a slim buy, this turns out to be a very useful and thoughtful manual.

HTML: The Definitive Guide by Chuck Musciano & Bill Kennedy

O'Rellly, £20.50 in UK

AND then there's this "definitive guide". It's almost 400 pages, looks dull and intimidating and ... isn't.

In fact, it's the kind of book that makes you want to rush to the photocopier, to copy various pages and plaster them on the wall next to your computer. The quick reference guides and handy appendices of how to get those strange characters like ± are already on mine.

Of all three Web manuals it has the neatest tricks too, and covers specialised areas such as "forms" and "client pull" and "server push" documents - topics normally skipped or skipped over by most other manuals.

Above all, Musciano and Kennedy stress that HTML is a language, a relatively new but rapidly evolving one, increasing in complexity as we speak. New browsers, bugs and "non standard" twists are creating further deviations in syntax, semantics and dialects. This book should make most readers totally fluent in its common, shared language - well, at least until HTML version 3.5 rears its ugly head . . .

Mac Addict

(maoazine/CD-Rom)

CD-ROM cover discs are almost de rigueur on computer mags nowadays, but this US-based one's first issue has much better fare than the usual "shovelware". The disc includes OpenDoc, Cyberdog and a System 7.5.3 update, and plenty of hidden Easter eggs" (surprise functions).

It also has animations which enhance the magazine's Web site pages when you download them. Expect more of this type of interplay between CD Roms and Web sites in coming months - US research company InfoTech predicts that hybrid CD Roms with links to download updates or play games will more than double to 720 this year.

But the magazine's editorial veers wildly from zippy, knowledgeable features to daft caricatures of Windows users, with the vacuous triumphalism that spoils so many Apple and Amiga publications these days. And the price? Easons charges £4.95 sterling (about IR£4.76) in its Belfast branch, while in Dublin it charges over a third more - a whopping IR£6.38.