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Dynamic HTML The Definitive Reference (2nd edition)
What's in the book?
The book is not an introduction to DHTML but it does have an 183-page section on Applying DHTML that covers not only the current state of the art but also gives clear guidance in making use of all the features. The guidance is of a good enough standard that a firm's Quality program could simply cite this book as the basis for the web development standards that a team adopts. Goodman makes it very clear that he is not going to discuss the DHTML that Navigator 4 introduced, the <layer> tag and JavaScript style rules, but points out that they are covered in the first edition should you really need to know.
The layout of the book is the same as the first edition, with the reference sections divided into HTML, DOM (Document Object Model), CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and JavaScript. A new section for Events also makes an appearance. The reference sections on HTML and DOM have sub-sections that precede them on the shared attributes of all elements. These are particularly useful and I think should be committed to memory.
There is also a very curious Cross Reference section that has an HTML/XHTML attribute index and a DOM property, method and event handler index. It takes each HTML/XHTML attribute and shows which elements support it and then each DOM scriptable object property, method and event and which objects support it. I'll confess I've never had any call to use this section but I can see how it could come in handy -- and it hardly takes up much dead tree.
The upper limit of standards coverage is HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.1, CSS Level 2, DOM Level 2, and JavaScript (or ECMAScript) 1.5. The browsers considered are IE6 (Windows), IE 5.1 (Mac), Netscape Navigator 6 and 7 and Mozilla 1.0. Opera is also mentioned in the section on Applying DHTML in that it mostly follows the IE DOM. The timeline for any element can go back as far as HTML 3.2, Navigator 2 or IE 3.
As you would expect, there are some useful appendices: Color Names and RGB Values, which I expect to be using more now as sites are required to meet Accessibility guidelines; HTML Character Entities, for when you don't have a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver or when your favourite HTML editor doesn't have a complete list; Keyboard Event Character Values, for your scripts when you want to catch all those key presses; Internet Explorer Commands, which along with the MSHTML.dll can allow the creation of a very neat content editor quite quickly and easily; and finally, an HTML/XHTML DTD Support cross-reference that may help catch validation errors as you move from an HTML 4.01 Transitional DTD to a full-on XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD.
What makes it worth having?The quality of Danny Goodman's writing is both technically accurate and easy to read. The clarity and lack of fluff is good, but there is no skimping on detail where such is needed to illuminate a point. Let's face it: web development is not as complex as most software engineering or systems development tasks, but it is a discipline with quite a wide base, reflected in the 1400 pages of this tome. I wouldn't trim any of it, however, and I expect that after about a year of use I will have referred to a good proportion of the contents. Take, for instance, Goodman's estimate that there are more than 15,000 unique instances of properties, methods, and event handlers supported by numerous document objects and you get an good impression of the size of the documentation required.
The book could be regarded as two books in one: There is the Applying DHTML book and the Reference book. The best things about the reference sections are the excellent descriptions, the clear little examples, and especially the quick summary of where you can expect these things to be supported. Referring to this book is the simplest way to avoid going down the proprietary browser extension cul de sac.
The Applying DHTML section is worth reading all the way through. It is great for getting yourself into the various technologies and seeing how they are meant to work. There are interesting points made on how each of the technologies are evolving. There's material contrasting the various DOM implementations and there are chapters on style sheets, positioning in CSS, making the content dynamic (of course, this is what DHTML is all about, after all) and scripting events.
There is a very useful cross-platform API for DHTML (which can be downloaded as a zip file along with the other examples from the book on O'Reilly's web site). I've used the version from the first edition quite a lot, and I've used the new version in my most recent work. It doesn't rely on browser version sniffing, but rather on object detection, which is explained with some examples, and can be easily extended to handle any DOM call you may wish to make. The API is especially useful for any CSS positioning tasks you may have. Goodman also goes over other strategies you can adopt to make your sites cross-platform, such as page branching, designing for a common denominator, and some other, neater, solutions.
There isn't anything on Accessibility other than a single paragraph drawing your attention to the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). DHTML and Accessibility could be considered inimical but that isn't the case and I'd perhaps have liked to see this elaborated on with some suggestions on how to achieve an Accessible site while still using DHTML. In practice, however, I've found it easy to meet the Priority 1 checkpoints (or A rating) set by the WAI even with a complete DHTML site so perhaps this is not really an issue.
I find this book really useful. I can't imagine any web developer doing without this book and managing to produce a good cross-platform solution, and I also can't imagine that developer needing any other texts on any of the technologies covered here. I certainly don't have any others on my desk today.
The O'Reilly web site has a complete Table of Contents available. You can purchase Dynamic HTML The Definitive Reference from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
That's a good point; much as I'd love to add stuff to my web pages, I don't want to block out some of the lower denominators such as lynx or, possibly more importantly, software such as readers for the blind. If DHTML screws up on those, you're losing a portion of your audience; not perhaps a large one, but it's still there.
This book covers a huge amount of material. After all, DHTML is just a name used for the interaction of a bunch of different things, and this book seems to try to cover all of them. I wonder whether Goodman is really an expert on all of it (or whether anyone can be). I'd be a lot more comfortable trusting a book like this if it were written by a group of authors with different areas of expertise.
Looking at what I can find about the book's coverage of CSS (which I know a lot about), I'm not optimistic. He seems to make up his own terminology, which can cause significant confusion in any public discussions. He uses the word "attributes" instead of "properties" (e.g., the CSS 'position' property) in the sample chapter available at O'Reilly. This is a mistake that's become very common these days, perhaps due to earlier editions of this book, and causes lots of confusion when people really need to discuss attributes (in HTML). The table of contents also shows sections titled by terms that he seems to have made up: "Common Subgroup Selectors" and "Advanced Subgroup Selectors".
It could be that he's decided he doesn't like the terminology used by the CSS specification so he's making new terminology. Such a decision has significant costs for communication between and among web developers and standards organizations. However, I fear it may not even be a conscious decision, but rather than he just doesn't know enough about CSS to know the correct terminology. (Not that I would expect any one person to be able to learn enough about all the topics covered in this book to be an authority on all of them.)
(If you want a good book on CSS, look for Eric Meyer's books on CSS, one of which is also published by O'Reilly.)
You obvisouly don't know what you are talking about.
Well-used Javascript and DHTML is harder to recognize than the obvious stuff you come across as popups and various ad-schemes. Apparently, you pull stats ("99.9999%") out of your ass and try to pass your opinions as facts. Are you in the industry, or is your main experience that as a surfer ?
There is tremendous power to DHTML and Javascript, and it is widely used in commercial sites. It allows the user to interact with the otherwise dead html in ways that help the user and the site.
For a great example, look at International Herald Tribune. You can select articles from the frontpage and put them in a "clippings" folder - no you don't have to login - and then you can read them all later on. No more "open in a new window". For individual articles you can select how it will presented; font size, colums per page etc. This is an example of a site that is usable and intuitive thanks to Javascript, in this case.
So, get a clue to what you are talking about.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Anything you can do, I can do meta.
Yes, half the slashdot population could indeed be using a browser that is not IE. However, 99% are not, so making DHTML compatible for other browsers should be the least of a web developer's concerns. Content and navigation should come first.
:)
I agree. I guess DHTML and JavaScript have excellent tools for intranets, for instance for services like accessing Novell GropWise through the web browser. I think you're right, that there are good uses for DHTML.
I don't mind useful applications, but it seems that the internet is more annoying now it was in 1996 and DHTML is one of the reasons no doubt. It does have good purposes, but no thank you 99% of the time, when I'm accessing the internet and not intranets.
Thank you to people who enlightened us all about intranet usefulness. I posted my opinion, it went to 4, Interesting, and generated a few explanations of how DHTML is useful. Now that my perspective had a counterpoint, my moderation quickly went down to zero. I ask, are we not all enlightened from the discussion that took place? How can something that entices useful information be devalued once moderators judge that a 'better' opinion appears, all stemming from this? And flamebait, of all things...
Cover your eyes and click this link!