HTML Tutorial: Conclusion

As promised, this tutorial has provided an introduction to HTML. This means that there is a lot more to the language than was covered in the preceding seven chapters -- tables, the future of HTML, and so on. For those of you interested in learning more (and I hope you are one of those people), I have assembled a number of references in Appendix C. I have also published a sequel called Intermediate HTML, which covers forms and ISO Latin-1 character entities, among a few other things.

It is my hope that you found this HTML tutorial easy to read and understand, and that now that you've finished it, you feel ready to start creating Web documents. If this is not the case, please let me know where improvements can be made, either via email or using the feedback form. As I said in the Introduction, I can't promise that I'll use your suggestions, or even necessarily respond to every message I receive, but I will read and consider everything you send me.

Incidentally, one last tip, in case you didn't already know: most current browsers give you the option to "View Source." For example, in Netscape, you would select the "View" menu and then the option "Source..." which will bring up the actual HTML document you've been looking at. This can be an invaluable aid to learning HTML, because you can teach yourself with real-world examples of use of the language. Be careful, though -- just because something can be done doesn't mean it's necessarily legal HTML. In fact, a lot of authors write illegal HTML. It's unfortunate and unnecessary, but it's also a fact.

Several errors were corrected and clarifications made due to the comments and efforts of everyone at Library Information Technologies; the interactive quiz system engine was finished thanks to the invaluable assistance of Alex Derbes. In addition, I'd like to thank the following people, more or less in the order of their first contact:

• Robert Barger, University of Notre Dame, who was the first person to send me feedback; in fact, his mail arrived before I'd even announced the tutorial's existence! In the process, he very politely pointed out a number of errors which I might never have noticed.
• Carole Leita, Berkeley Public Library, for pointing out my failure to mention a common use for the ALT tag.
• Tom Vassos, IBM / University of Toronto, for favorably mentioning the tutorial on his Web Diamonds mailing list and making a number of very useful corrections and suggestions.
• Ken Gaillot, Scimitar Internet Services, for pointing out a couple of major terminology mistakes on my part.
• Richard van de Stadt, University of Twente, for catching several typos, broken examples, and flat omissions, and for quite correctly pointing out that my use of the term "pound-sign" in Chapter 6 was likely to be confusing to European readers.
• Soren Rasmussen, Greenland Tourism, for providing the original inspiration for the quiz system and for suggesting the placement of references at the end of certain chapters.
• Tom Short, University of Hertfordshire, for pointing out the need to move the warning in Chapter 3 to a point where it would prevent confusion instead of compounding it.
• David W. Baker, Brown University, for some very good, insightful comments on some of my conceptual explanations.
• Sharyl L. Hayes, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, for catching a number of grammatical errors.
• Tad Simmons, University of Central Florida, for allowing me to improve Chapter 4 by using his examples, all of which were much better than mine, and for inadvertently introducing me to Superguy.
• Kay Strebeck, U.S. Defense Mapping Agency, who wins the Most Obscure Editorial Correction Award for pointing out, almost a year after the tutorial was published, that I had misspelled "aesthetic" in Chapter 4.
• Art, Carol, and Julie Meyer, my family, for giving me a number of good ideas in the course of a two-hour discussion about electronic books and readers' expectations.
• ...and to everyone who attended the HTML seminars I taught here at CWRU. It was the overwhelming demand for those seminars that finally convinced me I had to write this tutorial.

Next -- Appendix A: Tag Summary
Previous -- Chapter 7: Images
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