Looks easy to follow and the design is clean. It mentions accessibility in the 'What's next?' chapter, though, while I would have hoped this would be covered as part of the material in general.<p>For example, the section on forms suggests you use the 'for' attribute to link a label with a form element, which is great, but it wouldn't take much extra text to give a short explanation why this is helpful to many users.
I haven't read through more than the ToC at the moment -- but here's a quick summary of what I'd be interested to see, aside from just putting together uncluttered (and as-semantic-as-possible) HTML and maintainable CSS:<p>Support for older browsers -- I'd assume anything here will support evergreen browsers (including current IE) and emphasize how to always support that baseline. But what's involved in supporting older versions of IE, in particular? Easy mode: IE9+. Hard mode: IE6+. (I haven't had business reasons to support anything older than that, fortunately). There's obviously work involved (and not all sites need to do it) but it's worth pointing in the right direction for those who need to know.<p>Support for devices: how will it display on a phone? Tablet? What's likely to break? What main approaches are there? E.g., horiz elements wrap to vertical, different display entirely, let the user zoom/scan around, etc..<p>i18n/l10n: when you add multi-language support, some text will suddenly be three times as long, or even need to be displayed right-to-left. Numbers may align differently. What will happen to your menus, dropdowns, titles, etc.? Will they wrap in an ugly way, or be cut off? It's pretty common for things to just break, because the original site was built by someone who assumed "Home" would always be 4 chars.<p>And accessibility (already mentioned in another comment). Going into depth may be overkill, but I'd strongly advise covering the choices that <i>ruin</i> accessibility entirely. There are basic best practices that aren't too hard to follow that will make a site at least usable by people with non-standard browsers (even if it won't win any awards).
Seems to be really well crafted for the complete beginners with step-by-step, encouraging approach (LEGO, clear transition from text to HTML with side-by-side comparison etc.)<p>If you're targeting novices, perhaps you'll find some inspiration for the layout in O'Reilly's "Head First" series: <a href="http://shop.oreilly.com/category/series/head-first.do?sortby=publicationDate&page=all" rel="nofollow">http://shop.oreilly.com/category/series/head-first.do?sortby...</a><p>They have done incredible work to make not only the content, but also its presentation attractive for the beginners.
Just out of of curiosity: Which tools did you use to write the book? I know it's especially hard to create different file format (HTML, epub, PDF).
Whenever I see one of these free books or websites, I say "Oh boy! I'm finally going to sit down and learn how to code/build websites/etc." I start but after a while I begin to slow down and ultimately stop.<p>I want to learn to code but every guide and how-to I read tells me to start with a different programming language and I never know who to trust.
Great beginners guide! Perhaps consider selling it, or adding a donate button. I've noticed that I always finish books I've actually paid for :)