L. Aronson, Ziff-Davis Press, Emeryville, CA, USA
ISBN: 1-56276-300-8, 132 pp, paperback, £18-49, 1994.

The Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) have now become valuable learning, teaching and training resources. Consequently, over the last few years, books on these topics have become very popular. Essentially, these deal with three basic issues: the underlying theoretical and technical matters relating to using distributed networks; accessing the Internet and WWW services; and web publishing. An important aspect of publishing material on the World-Wide Web is the use of an appropriate markup language so that search engines and web browsers (such as Lynx, Cello, Mosaic and Netscape) can access the information and interpret it in the correct way.  The markup language used on World Wide Web is HTML (an acronym for HyperText Markup Language) - which, through the use of an appropriate DTD (Document Type Definition), is essentially a 'subset' of the ISO 8879 standard SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language). Obviously, anyone wishing to publish material on the WWW would find some knowledge of HTML useful.  This monograph provides a helpful introduction to the topic.

The book contains just four chapters, three appendices and a subject index.  The opening chapter (entitled 'What is HTML?') is very short and provides a brief introduction to HTML, hypertext and hypermedia, Mosaic, WWW and the Internet. Chapter 2 is more substantial in size and is devoted to the HTML (Level 2) language itself. It covers such issues as: HTML syntax; formatting tags (for headings, paragraphs, lists and styles); anchors and links; images; and forms (which facilitate input from users).  In chapter 3 the author discusses how to write HTML documents.  The chapter is organised into four major sections which together cover such issues as: general principles; identifying good HTML style; how to create a home page; and the conversion of existing documents into HTML format.  The final chapter of the book is by far the largest and is devoted to a series of eight case studies.

In each case study the author describes various existing Web pages that are accessible through the Net and then goes on to discuss the HTML encoding underlying their appearance.  The particular examples presented in this chapter include: a personal home page; typical home pages for small and large organisations; an electronic brochure; a Web survey; and pages for a number of subject guides and specialisms.  The site addresses (URLs) for the examples are given and, surprisingly, they can all be accessed relatively easily.  I used a full-screen, text-based browser (Lynx) to access them. Indeed, I explored the home pages described in the book using an old DOS-based computer (an Amstrad 1640) as a remote terminal running at 1200 baud (using VT100 emulation).  Not surprisingly, however, most of the pages (except the Web survey) were in many ways different from those described by Aronson. Obviously, since the book was originally published much of the material has been updated and restructured.

I was interested to find that on page 107 of the book, the example used to illustrate the home page for the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (BayCHI) was advertising a talk entitled 'Too Much Hypertext or Too Little?' by Jacob Nielson (to be given on Tuesday, October 11th, 1994).  When I accessed this same page almost a year later (while writing this review) I was excited to see the BayCHI page advertising a lecture to be given by two of my 'HCI heroes' (William Buxton and Stuart Card) entitled 'Radical Human-Computer Interaction' - scheduled for Tuesday, October 10th, 1995 at 7.30 pm!  Wouldn't it be lovely if the Internet could be used to transmit this lecture 'live' to interested people in Europe?  Unfortunately, herein lies some of its basic limitations.  Maybe the future 'Information SuperHighway' will provide enough bandwidth for this type of thing to happen.  Who knows?

In addition to the case study examples described above, the three appendices at the end of the book are also very useful. The first one provides a 'quick reference guide' to HTML (based on the HTML 2.0 DTD specification).  The second appendix gives an overview of HTML+ - this describes many of the new features and extensions that are to appear in new versions of the language. The third of the three appendices gives details of various HTML resources (such as guides and references, browsers, conversion tools and list-servers) many of which can be obtained using the World Wide Web itself. Unfortunately, since the book was published, the 'info.cern.ch' documents have been relocated to 'www.w3.org'. This meant that my initial attempts at accessing some of the guides and references failed when I entered the URLs quoted by Larry Aronson.

Overall, although the book has some very minor limitations (such as 'out of date' URLs and the occasional spelling error, I found it quite interesting and fairly easy to read. The author is thorough in his explanations and has chosen some good examples in order to illustrate the points he wanted to make.  It is my belief that the text will make a useful 'first reader' for those wishing to launch themselves into markup techniques and Web publishing.  It is also a book that I would definitely recommend to any student who wants to find out about HTML and what it has to offer.
 

Philip Barker
University of Teesside
Cleveland, UK