HTML 6ed Table of Contents

Well, I got my first copies of the new Sixth Edition of my HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide in my hands! They're beautiful, if I do say so myself! All full color, really clear, bigger example code, great new chapters. I'm pleased!

Check out the new Table of Contents.

I should have examples up by tomorrow. The rest of the site will be in a state of flux for the next few days, but hopefully not much longer than that.

You can preorder the book from Amazon for 37% off!

Foreign Language Editions

A number of readers have asked me if the new Sixth Edition of my HTML, XHTML, and CSS book will be available in other languages and so I've been researching that. Currently, the Fifth Edition is available in Chinese, Croatian, Finnish, French, Greek, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish.

There are Fourth Edition books also available in Bulgarian, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese.

You can find the full table, with as many book covers as I could find, in the About section on my Web site.

As soon as I have more information about Sixth Edition translations, I'll post it here.

Two-tone borders

So, I'm doing a final read-through on the new edition of my book and I got to the section on borders in tables and there was something that just didn't make sense. I made up a little test case, and I couldn't get Internet Explorer to show me any kind of two-tone border (like outset, inset, groove or ridge). I had already achieved this feat in the Layout with Styles chapter, so I couldn't understand what was going on. Didn't IE do two-tone borders in tables?

But it wasn't the tables that were the problem. It was the color. When I tested the two-tone borders in the Layout chapter, I was using colors like purple and red and blue (since the new edition is in full color!!! :), but in my little table test, I was just using black. And therein lies the problem: Internet Explorer (at least IE6 and IE7, I confess I didn't test earlier browsers) can't do two-tone black borders.

It must be something about the algorithm it uses to calculate the two colors. Usually, if you choose a two-tone border, the browser calculates the second color from the first one you chose. But if you choose a really dark color like black (or #020202, which I also tried), Internet Explorer chooses something so dark for the offset color that you can't tell the difference. The result is that your outset, inset, groove or ridge borders look decidedly solid:

IE can do red two-tone borders, but not black ones

 

Firefox does any color two-tone borders

 

Opera, too, does any color two-tone borders

Here's the little sample table with two-tone borders.