The Internet has come a long way. In fact, even if you’re only a few months past 10 years old, you’ve seen the Internet and the World Wide Web grow up to affect nearly every aspect of global culture—education, commerce, politics, and entertainment. It’s been a fast change and one that affects most of us either personally, professionally or both. One of the results has been the need for Web publishing skills for many knowledge workers, educators, and professionals. Hobbyists, club members, and parents can benefit as well from knowing a little something about Web publishing. In fact, Web publishing may one day be the “typing” of the future—nearly anyone with a secondary education will need a firm grasp on the basics. For now, it’s an important bullet point on many résumés as well as the key to many plum assignments, both paid and unpaid. If you’re ready to put together and manage your own Web site, then it’s time to get a book on the subject and start learning.

The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Web Page is the perfect place to start. You can divide the study of Web publishing into two approaches—those that focus on the underlying code-level technologies and those that teach the broad strokes of Web publishing via graphical Web editors. This book is a friendly guide to the first of these approaches, showing you how to dig into the HTML and XHTML standards to build Web pages, manage Web sites, and augment them with further levels of complexity—style sheets and scripting among them. At the end of this book, you’ll understand many of the more complex issues involved in Web publishing, even if you don’t have a single Web page to your name. Let me stress, however, that this book is not for everyone. The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Web Page is designed to take you from basic computer literacy— you understand how to create files and type in Windows, the Macintosh OS, or a variant of Unix—and help you build, manage, and maintain your first Web pages and Web sites. You’ll do this by building, chapter by chapter, an understanding of the authoring codes (for creating Web pages), the graphical and multimedia technologies, and eventually the scripting and programming basics necessary for a full interactive and interesting Web site.

If you’re interested in Web publishing skills for use in your company, organization, or education, you should find this book a great place to start. All the principles are outlined, terms are defined, and fundamentals are explained. And that’s done without the “cutesy” approach that some other beginner series can devolve into. But I also want to be honest about the approach. If your goal is a “Web Page in a day,” this book isn’t for you. Likewise, if you plan to begin your foray into Web publishing using a particular graphical tool, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, I’d suggest a book that specifically discusses that tool. I believe that the approach in the Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Web Page is the best one, because it’s still very important to understand the underlying code of today’s Web pages to truly soak up a new skill. Although graphical tools can help (and, in fact, I’ll cover a few of them in Chapter 20, “Graphical Editors”), anyone who wants to really understand Web pages and put together entire Web sites should consider the code-level approach that is found in these pages. Fortunately, learning XHTML, style sheets, JavaScript, and even Dynamic HTML really isn’t all that tough—in my opinion, a pricey Web editor can sometimes just get in your way!