On this website you will find the examples of my book "HTML und CSS - The Comprehensive Guide"

Foreword

The first questions you’ll probably ask yourself about a book of this scope is whether it’s a book for you at all and what you’ll learn from it. The title already indicates that HTML and CSS are covered here. If you’ve flipped through the book a bit or skimmed the table of contents, you’ll have noticed that it contains much more than HTML and CSS. Just a few years ago, an author could leave it at simply writing a book on HTML with a little CSS. Then, with the new standard HTML version, the demands for creating websites have increased.

The focus of the book is still on HTML and CSS. Thus, in the first seven chapters, you’ll get to know the basics of HTML. Since HTML is the basic language for website development, this book is also attractive to newcomers because it starts from scratch. Even if you’re still familiar with the old HTML school (i.e., you’ve already dealt with HTML before the time of HTML5), you should approach this book as a newcomer and definitely read through the first seven chapters to give yourself an update of your probably outdated HTML knowledge.

Because many of the innovations of the HTML standard can be addressed via JavaScript (application programming interfaces [APIs]), it’s obvious that JavaScript must also be treated as a web programming language. In this context, you should be aware that you’ll only get a brief and simple introduction to JavaScript, which is necessary to at least use and understand the Document Object Model (DOM) manipulations in practice. The scope of JavaScript alone would fill an entire book. I mention this here only to avoid raising any false hopes. In addition, if you’ve never dealt with a programming language before, JavaScript will probably be your first real programming language. But if you already do have experience with another programming language, JavaScript won’t cause you any problems.

What’s not covered in this book are web programming languages such as PHP, Python, or Java. While PHP is used in a few examples in the book, it’s only used in passing to demonstrate specific examples to you. For web programming with PHP and MySQL, you should definitely get other literature if you want to dive deeper into it. However, a prerequisite for PHP and MySQL for programming dynamic websites is again a good knowledge of HTML and CSS, which is another good reason to read and work through this book. So, if you’re drawn to dynamic web programming, this book is an ideal first building block for that.

To avoid misunderstandings about HTML as a hypertext markup language, HTML5, and HTML as a living standard, these terms will be clarified at the beginning of the book. At the beginning, I briefly referred to HTML5. After the invention of the web, there were different phases in which a standard for HTML was created. Initially, only the W3C as a body took care of the standardization of HTML, which hasn’t always been smooth with regard to the browser manufacturers. As the web was rapidly moving from a pure hypertext system to a platform for web applications, the W3C attempted to promulgate a new XML-based standard, XHTML, although browser vendors preferred to continue development based on HTML.

As a result, Apple, Opera, and Mozilla founded a new group, Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), which was then joined by Google and Microsoft to continue working on the HTML standard independently of the W3C. When the W3C wasn’t able to enforce the change to XML, the focus returned to the further development of HTML. This gave rise to the HTML5 standard together in cooperation with the WHATWG. Yet, the harmony between W3C and WHATWG didn’t last long. While the W3C stuck to versioning, the WHATWG wanted to make it a living standard without a number.

Again, however, the W3C has joined the WHATWG, and, as of May 28, 2019, HTML is a living standard without a version number. Accordingly, there will probably never be an HTML6.