- Schmitt, Christopher.
CSS Cookbook.
Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2004. ISBN 0-596-00576-8.
-
It's taken a while, but
Cascading Style Sheets
have finally begun to live up to their promise of separating
content from presentation on the Web, allowing a consistent design,
specified in a single place and easily modified, to be applied to
large collections of documents, and permitting content to be
rendered in different ways depending on the media and audience:
one style for online reading, another for printed output, an austere
presentation for handheld devices, large type for readers with impaired
vision, and a text-only format tailored for screen reader programs
used by the blind. This book provides an overview of CSS solutions
for common Web design problems, with sample code and screen shots
illustrating what can be accomplished. It doesn't purport to be a
comprehensive reference—you'll want to have Eric Meyer's
Cascading Style Sheets:
The Definitive Guide
at hand as you develop your own CSS solutions, but Schmitt's book is
valuable in showing how common problems can be solved in ways which
aren't obvious from reading the specification or a reference book.
Particularly useful for the real-world Web designer are Schmitt's
discussion of which CSS features work and don't work in various popular
browsers and suggestions of work-arounds to maximise the cross-platform
portability of pages.
Many of the examples in this book are more or less obvious, and
embody techniques which folks who've rolled their own
Movable Type
style sheets will be familiar, but every chapter has one or more
gems which caused this designer of minimalist Web pages to slap
his forehead and exclaim, “I didn't know you could do that!”
Chapter 9, which presents a collection of brutal hacks, many
involving exploiting parsing bugs, for working around browser
incompatibilities may induce nausea in those who cherish standards
compliance or worry about the consequences of millions of pages
on the Web containing ticking time bombs which will cause them
to fall flat on their faces when various browser bugs are fixed.
One glimpses here the business model of the Web site designer who
gets paid when the customer is happy with how the site looks in
Exploder and views remediation of incompatibilities down the road
as a source of recurring revenue. Still, if you develop and maintain
Web sites at the HTML level, there are many ideas here which can
lead to more effective Web pages, and encourage you to dig deeper
into the details of CSS.
January 2005 