Web Writing/Web Designing is a slender book designed for the teacher who is not a Web guru but wishes to incorporate Web writing components in her classroom. It's meant to supplement another text and focuses on basic HTML, Web design, the use of graphics and links, and employing tables for page layout purposes. Margaret Batschelet (University of Texas at San Antonio) explains in her Preface that it's "a book about writing for the World Wide Web, but we need to begin by looking at what writing means in this context" (her emphasis xiii). The book is intended to supplement other texts in a variety of composition classes, and its chapters move from simple, nuts-and-bolts discussions of Web pages and how HTML works to represent more complex writing tasks, such as laying out pages using tables (chapter 5) and integrating cascading style sheets (chapter 9). Throughout, the book offers handy tables of terms and HTML tags, lists of Web sites, "Try It" exercises, and writing assignments.
          The first two chapters move readers from knowing nothing about the Web to posting simple text Web pages, explaining simply how HTML works and what basic tags to use. The heart of the book are chapters 3, 4, and 5: Batschelet's discussions of using images, understanding Web readers and Web writing styles (which includes organization), and creating tables to layout pages. These chapters, while simple, offer lots of important information about image formats, audience and purpose of pages, the rudiments of tables and their effect on readers. Chapter 6 highlights using page grids, color schemes, white space, contrast, typography, and different effects on pages. Batschelet boils everything down to four simple principles: relationships, simplicity, consistency, and redundancy (119). Chapter 7 discusses how to employ links. Chapter 8 offers ways to organize the site's architecture (for example, linear, hierarchical, network, or wheel organization). Chapter 9 explains how to incorporate internal and external style sheets, and the Appendix provides a quick, down-and-dirty discussion of frames.