ISBN 0-471-37486-5
471 pages
September, 2000

Book Outline

The XHTML 1.0 Web Development Sourcebook:
Building Better Sites and Applications

Site URL: http://www.iangraham.org/books/xhtml2/

by Ian S. Graham

The XHTML 1.0 Web Development Sourcebook is a complete guide to the technical and management aspects of Web application development and design. Written as a companion book for The XHTML 1.0 Language and Design Sourcebook, this book is designed to teach you all you need to understand and manage large-scale web Site and Web software development projects, the books' 12 chapters (see below) cover the basics of the core technologies behind the Internet and web development, and explain how they are related. In addition, several chapters provide best-practice guidance for managing Web development projects, based on the author's several years of Web development experience. Finally, each chapter concludes with a detailed reference list of related Web sites, technical books and other resources to help you learn more and keep up-to-date.

Additional Information available at the Web site. Finally, this supporting Web site (available as a downloadable archive) provides much additional information, including: an online version of the book's chapter-by-chapter References; all book code examples in online form; example style sheets; extra material discussing MIME types; and example documents illustrating character and entity references and color names.

Chapter Descriptions

Chapter 1: Markup and Layout Review: XHTML and CSS

A brief introduction to the concepts of markup and style sheet control of rendering, using HTML and CSS as examples.

Chapter 2: The eXtensible Markup Language (XML)

Introduction to XML; A review of XHTML, MathML, SMIL, and other XML dialects; Distributing XML data over the Web; Browsers and XML; Non-browser uses for XML

Chapter 3: Software Processing of XML and HTML

XML processing and parsing; the SAX and DOM programming interfaces, using XSLT, browser processing of HTML; Internet Explorer XML data islands in HTML; Mozilla approaches for doing the same thing.

Chapter 4: Technical Web Page Design

Setting technical page requirements; managing technical aspects of a Web design project; tips for speed optimizations, approaches for cross-browser design (HTML, CSS, and scripting); accessible design, printable design, component-based HTML design

Chapter 5: Web Site Architecture and Design

Linear and Hierarchical Webs; Multimedia and Hypermedia; Themes in site design and implementation; Site design tips; Site indexes and searching; Dynamic content and user tracking

Chapter 6: Web Site Maintenance and Management

Process and management of Web projects; project research, brainstorming, and design; establishing testing procedures; deployment and ongoing maintenance of sites and applications

Chapter 7: Internet Networking

Introduction to the IP protocol; TCP and UDP; IP addresses; domain names, Domain Name System, security and firewalls, IP masquerading; network management and security

Chapter 8: Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)

URL syntax, URL character encoding and escaping; query strings in URLs; common URL schemes; URIs and URNs

Chapter 9: The HTTP Protocol

HTTP 1.0 overview; GET, POST, PUT and HEAD methods; header fields and status codes; cookies; access control and authentication; proxy servers; data encryption. content negotiation

Chapter 10: Data Processing on an HTTP Server

The common gateway interface; CGI examples; CGI and HTML forms; state preservation; cookies; server APIs; servlets; CGI accelerators

Chapter 11: CGI Programming Examples and Parsed HTML

CGI examples; CGI-based client pull and server push animations; CGI programming and security issues; CGI security wrappers; Server-side includes (SSI)

Chapter 12: Web Application Development Tools

Site management tools; content management tools; page scripting environments; web application servers

Supplementary Material -- Found Only at this Web site

Appendix A: Character Sets, Character Encodings, and Document Character Sets

About character sets, encodings, and character /entity references in HTML and XML documents.

Appendix B: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)

How MIME works and how it relates to HTTP server and Web application development

Appendix C: Monitoring HTTP Transactions

A description of using the programs telnet, listen, backtalk, and monitor, to monitor HTTP sessions.

Appendix D: HTTP Methods and Header Fields Reference

A reference to the methods, status codes, and header fields supported by HTTP 1.0, HTTP 1.1, WebDAV and transparent content-negotiation.

Appendix E: Apache Parsed HTML

A short specification for the syntax of the Apache parsed HTML environment.