Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal on the cover of Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference, Second Edition, is a flamingo. Flamingos are easily identifiable by their long legs and neck, turned-down bill, and bright color, which ranges from white to pink to bright red. There are five living species of flamingo, encompassing the family Phoenicopteridae. Flamingos are found in Asia, Africa, Europe, South American, and the Caribbean islands. Although wild flamingos are sometimes seen in Florida, they do not naturally nest in the United States.

Flamingos feed on small crustaceans, algae, and other unicellular organisms. Their unusually shaped bills provide flamingos with a unique food-filtering system. A flamingo eats by placing its head upside down below the water surface and sucking in water and small food particles through the serrated edges of its bill. The flamingo then pushes its thick, fleshy tongue forward, forcing the water out but trapping the food particles on lamellae inside the beak.

As a result of this filtration system, flamingos can eat foods few other birds can, and thus can live in otherwise inhospitable salt lakes and brackish waters. The filtration technique varies in the different species of flamingo. As a result of this differentiation, several species can live in the same water source and not disturb each other.

Flamingos are very gregarious birds, and they nest in colonies that sometimes consist of thousands of birds. Males and females together build nests. The nests are composed of mud, stones, and shells, shaped in a cone formation. One, and occasionally two, eggs are laid in a shallow depression at the top of the cone. Both sexes incubate the eggs for 27 to 31 days.

In the wild, flamingos tend to live in remote, difficult-to-reach areas. In the suburbs, however, they stand guard over many a front lawn. Colleen Gorman was the production editor and copyeditor for Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference, Second Edition. Sheryl Avruch, Linley Dolby, and Matt Hutchinson provided quality control. Lucie Haskins wrote the index.

Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Emma Colby produced the cover layout with QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

Melanie Wang designed the interior layout, based on a series design by David Futato. This bookwas converted to FrameMaker 5.5.6 with a format conversion tool created by ErikRay, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the bookwere produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand 9 and Adobe Photoshop 6. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary.