Special thanks to

Nancy Davis, at Peachpit Press, who has given me the most perfect combination of encouragement, editing, and friendship.

Andrei Pasternak and Mimi Heft, and all the other folks at Peachpit Press, for all their help getting this book out.

Kate Reber and Nolan Hester, both formerly of Peachpit Press, for their help with earlier editions of this book.

The Web is an incredible resource. Not only do people share their knowledge freely on their Web sites, but they are also incredibly generous with their time, helpfully answering my questions, no matter how arcane. In particular, I'd like to thank Larry Ullman, whose PHP for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, Second edition is an excellent way to begin with PHP, and who kindly helped me polish up my first scripts (http://www.dmcinsights.com/phpmysql/), Richard Ishida, whose tutorials at the W3C (http://www.w3.org/International/) on creating Multilingual Web sites are invaluable; Patrick Woolsey, at Barebones Software (http://www.barebones.com), for very helpful and timely answers to all my encoding and BBEdit questions, Alan Wood, whose Unicode Resources Web site (http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/) was a major source of information for the Symbols and Non-English Characters chapter, Jeffrey Zeldman, whose online magazine, A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com), is an essential resource for Web designers, and Paul Boutin, Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Patrick Griffiths, Ian Hickson, Molly Holzschlag, Steve Krug, Drew McLellan, Eric Meyer, John Oxton, Dave Shea, Geoff Stearns, and Danny Sullivan, whose books, blogs, Web sites, and generosity I have found most inspiring.

Andreu, for his feedback, for his great Photoshop tips, and for sharing his life with me; and my sweet kids to whom I can finally reply, "Yes, I can play with you now."

Llumi and Xixo, for chasing cherry tomatoes and each other around my office and for helping me think up examples of (X)HTML documents; and the new generation of Sky, Night, and Sir Edmund, who we still hope might come back.

And all the readers of earlier versions of this book, who took the time to write me with accolades, questions, and suggestions.