Webmaster in a Nutshell, Third Edition

Preface

This book is for web developers, or anyone who works at the content end of the World Wide Web. Do you author or maintain web documents? Are you a programmer developing web-based client or server applications? Are you the administrator of a web site, responsible for maintaining and updating server software?

There are innumerable books and online resources for learning web-related skills. This book pares them down to a single desktop-sized volume for easy reference. You may be a whiz at JavaScript, but sometimes forget the details on an obscure function you seldom use. You may know HTML fairly well, but can never remember the correct syntax for creating tables. You might forget the directive for creating directory aliases on your server or how to enforce password protection on documents.

By no means is this book a replacement for more detailed books on the Web. But when those books have been digested and placed on your bookshelves with pride, this one will remain on your desktop.

Contents

In the years immediately after the first edition of this book was published in 1996, we watched the Web explode, with new technologies every month scrambling to make last month’s technology obsolete. Then we watched the Web settle down, as standards caught up with features, and fiscal realities caught up with IPOs. The land grab was over as quickly as it began, and miraculously, the code you wrote last night still works after downloading the latest browser this morning. The Web has reached ...