This is a fat book with a lot to like in it. The authors thoroughly explain HTML (and its recently-standardized twin XHTML) in its latest version (4.01). They also give a good explication of layout using the current standard (CSS2) of Cascading Style Sheets. They spend some time talking about embedded content such as pictures, Java applets and Javascript scripts. They look, too, at XML, which is the "meta-language" used to define XHTML.
At the time they wrote this book (2002) the versions of the standardized languages they discuss were in the avant-garde. But many of the old ways of doing things are now obsolete, and older browser versions gone. Unfortunately, the authors constantly advert to these early browser versions and their quirks, and spend much time discussing outmoded and non-standard techniques that by their own admission should be avoided. (Let me emphasize that they whole-heartedly approve of the direction away from non-standard and layout-laden HTML and toward the CSS approach.)
As it is, this book is quite usable whether you are writing old-fashioned HTML and loading your documents with physical layout instructions, or writing austere strict-version XHTML and restraining yourself to using style sheets to do layout. It has detailed essays on all the tags and a good chapter on CSS, and has useful appendices at the end for HTML grammer and tags, and for style sheet properties. It also has much that no longer applies. Perhaps the next edition will be less universally useful -- but also lighter.
