Website Creation In Plain English: From Bare Bones To Bells And Whistles was a book started more than 10 years ago.
The chain of events that led to this began way back in September of 2004 with my rather naive post on how bad HTML was HTML's greatest strength. This sparked an attempt at a project called (The Complete?) Web Development Guide (two attempts, actually) for which I did an article called The HTML Document, From Top To Bottom, meant to be an outline of a page's structure. I also did an overview of CSS. While I sadly no longer have a copy of either article, they each eventually blossomed into the first two parts of this tutorial (I wrote on JavaScript much later).
I worked on it throughout college (I attended DeVry Institute of Technology in Calgary from 2005-2008) and basically finished it in the years after graduation. But I never could really get it peer-reviewed and was thus reluctant to publish it. Besides, all the graphics I used meant hardcopy was out of the question.
I eventually thought of putting it on a CD, as the entire book had been written using XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1. I also added some JavaScript goodies for the reader, allowing for page breaks to be defined and images resized for better printing (there are a few bugs in the JavaScript that I never did figure out, but for the most part, this book works—especially if all you want to do is read it.). But a problem arose: my reluctance to release an unreviewed tutorial eventually caused the whole thing to be rendered obsolete by the advent of HTML5 (I thought it would be made obsolete by XHTML 2.0. Boy, was I wrong.), making publishing kind of a moot point now. Amongst other things, the blink
property has vanished from CSS (alas), but it was fully functional when the book was written.