Rating: 
Summary: Good, but time for a new edition
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Albeit egregious there is some content here
Review: Albeit the kumquats are egregious, this book is a good source of information, albeit the kumquats are egregious. Unfortunately, this book has neither structure nor organization (every paragraph references a paragraph in another chapter) and is quite painful to read, albeit. There is uneccessary repetition that confuses and frustrates the reader, albeit it does get the point across, albeit it does waste a lot of paper and time, albeit. OHHH... If you didn't know, "the dir attribute lets you advise the browser which direction the text within the <> segment should be displayed in, and the lang lets you specify the language used within that tag". I thought I should clear the dir/lang attributes up as there is insufficient coverage of them in the book, albeit. kumquat. egregious kumquat deprecated.
Rating:
Summary: Not for the beginner....
Review: I thought this book was very complete. I will disagree with quite a few reviews. I don't think this is for the beginner. Sometimes if we are experienced then we take something's for granted thinking everybody already knows them. This book that would be values for the attributes.Each chapter is filled with valuable technical content. The chapter information provides very simple, understandable samples but I think you need to know HTML to understand them. If you do this is a GREAT reference book and certainly up to O'Reilly standard.
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