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Core CSS (2nd ed.)
Simon P. Chappell writes "It used to be that a website could be standards compliant or it could be attractive and impressive to prospective customers, but it could almost never be both. Now with the rise of CSS compliant browsers, a new generation of web designers are finding that the old wisdom is ready to be retired. CSS technology allows a website to have both excellent, semantically indicated content and attractive layouts. Core CSS (2ed.) positions itself as a complete guide to all of this standards based goodness." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review.
Core CSS (2nd ed.)
author
Keith Schengli-Roberts
pages
818 (10 page index)
publisher
Prentice Hall
rating
6
reviewer
Simon P. Chappell
ISBN
0130092789
summary
A flawed diamond
What is CSS? Cascading Style Sheets (the CSS part of the book's title) are a way to separate the content and presentation of a web page. The CSS file holds the presentation instructions, leaving the HTML to hold only the content. While CSS is a formal World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard, the adoption has been somewhat slow, with browsers only reaching full compliance with the base level of the standard within the past year or so. So why is CSS useful? CSS shines when it is used to define the style of a whole site. Want all of your headings to be the right shade of your corporate blue? No problem. Want every page to have the corporate logo on it's background? No problem. Whoops, got bought by GlobalMegaUberCorporation Inc. and need to change the colours and background logos in a hurry? No problem, just change the CSS definitions and your new corporate identity will shine out for all your customers to see. What do I know about CSS? I am a relative newcomer to CSS, having been laying out websites using tables since 1995. I had decided that it was time to learn how to bring my personal website up to speed with the latest standards, when I was offered the chance to review this book, so I took Prentice Hall PTR up on the opportunity. This review then, is from the perspective of one who knows HTML well enough to develop a couple of sites using only vi and who has decided to learn CSS. Overview The back cover blurb claims that Core CSS 2nd Edition is a comprehensive guide that shows both beginning and expert web developers all they need to know to achieve great results with the latest style sheet properties. It also claims to be ... the most complete and up-to-date CSS reference available. This review will explore those two claims. What's To Like The first thing to like about this book is that it does cover almost everything that it's possible to write about Cascading Style Sheets. I have included the table of contents below so that you can get a feel for the breadth that this book aims at covering. The writing style is clear and explanatory with an underlying conversational tone, quite suited to this manner of book. It is also obvious from the text that Mr. Schengli-Roberts does understand his subject matter very well indeed.
The biggest thing to like about this book, for me, is appendix B, an alphabetical listing of the defined CSS properties and values. This list covers 92 pages and is a key part of the whole book. Importantly, it doesn't feel like filler and gives an impression that care has been taken in devising this very useful resource. Each entry in the appendix gives an example of correct usage of each property, which as a CSS neophyte I appreciated greatly.
What's To Consider This book carries a 2004 copyright, yet it feels old when you view the list of browser compatibilities for each property. While it does give compatibility information for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, it only covers Mozilla 1.0, it mentions Konqueror without any version details and completely omits Apple's Safari browser. This spotty coverage seems at odds with the rest of the book and really felt like a glaring omission to me. Summary This is a good book -- and if you're in the process of learning to use Cascading Style Sheets, you should certainly consider it for your collection. It is flawed by a poor selection of browsers for it's compatibility lists; while this may not be an issue for you, I found it quite irksome. This explains my review score and my description of this book as a flawed diamond.Far more information than most people could ever want to know about Simon P. Chappell is available at his personal website. You can purchase Core CSS (2nd ed.) from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Run DeCSS and be free of it forever!
csszengarden.com is a great example of CSS can be rich, powerful and compliant.
both excellent, semantically indicated content and attractive layouts.
/home/corecss/public_html/properties/full-chart.ph p on line 38
Well I don't like the layout, but that is subjective.
But click on Full CSS Browser Compatibility Chart and you get Warning: mysql_connect(): Access denied for user: 'corecss_corecss1@localhost' (Using password: YES) in
Oops...
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
For a minute there I thought Dave Chappelle wrote a book on CSS.
I'm codin', bitch!MY SECRET DIARIES
Now all they need is a good database primer.
"Warning: mysql_connect(): Access denied for user: 'corecss_corecss1@localhost' (Using password: YES) in
Comprehensive, informal, and somewhat long-winded roadmap for anyone who has heard about web standards, thinks they might want web standards, but doesn't know where to start.
I truly don't understand why anyone is still using <font> tags. Instead of making the site design more difficult, strictly seperating appearance from content has made maintenance far easier. I'm still slightly amazed that I can completely re-do the appearance of my employer's website by editing a single file, and when my boss decided that he hated the way links looked, he was thrilled that it took me about 30 seconds to globally change them.
Seriously, this is the way web design was meant to be.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
What I have a problem with is the fact that the whole book, every example for every property, was completely embedded into the HTML itself. Their was a slight reference to externally described CSS but no examples to follow. The idea of the sheets is to set a number of parameters for most or all of your pages to follow. Embedding them into the HTML every time defeats the purpose. Also their were some mentions to multiple options techniques that never had any kind of example or visual of any kind to follow so you can see how this could be useful. In that sense the beginner user would be completely lost on something that can be helpful down the road.
Cascading Style Sheets are all well and good--actually, I use them on my website, and I love them--but the painful part is ensuring compliance among browsers. I'm a self-taught, amateur geek, and I code my XHTML and CSS by hand. I don't read tutorials: I read the W3C recommendations. Anyway, I like to think I can interpret rather exacting writing such as Web specifications without misunderstanding, but I always seem to botch something so that things are out of alignment and so forth in this or that browser--usually Internet Explorer.
In summary, CSS is good, but it'd be better if all browsers actually followed the standards and interpreted any ambiguity the same way. That's all I want, so I can remain sane!
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
As an act of rebellion, I ran all my web pages through deCSS and now I've got the MPAA after me!!!
On a more serious note, I do like CSS as it is very handy when it comes to making site-wide changes. The big thing about it, though, is that it has to be there from the very beginning. Not that planning is a bad thing, but when you inherit site maintenance from someone that apparently heard Frontpage was "da bomb" and those FONT tags are everywhere, it hurts.
I'm still having problems doing positioning with CSS, but I figure that comes with actually trying it out and working through various browser issues. Tables are still a very convenient way to get layout going...and it's a bad habit that needs to be fixed.
For anyone who's starting a web project, DEFINITELY look into CSS. Even though it's got a bigger initial time investment, it pays off greatly in maintenance. Especially when the marketeers ask for a blue that's 3 shades lighter than what you currently have on 100 or so pages.
Write a book advocating the joys of CSS and then use a non standard cursor for the "a" tag ;)
Not to be flamebait or anything. An honest question...
What exactly does this book have that is not available at W3schools.com?
Someone for the love of god implement FLOAT MIDDLE
I mean geesh, just give designers a bit of help with a small FLOAT MIDDLE syntax.
Well, I went on a CSS bender and discovered that while it is great for pretty much all mundane styling problems, it still sucks when trying to layout content in table-like columns. Simple things like just getting a three column layout with various justifications, or getting divisions that occupy as little space as possible (since you can't tell it to "occupy as little space as possible" you have to rely on hacks like saying, "ok, bound yourself by margin parameters which eat up all empty space") is heinously difficult and requires bizarre hacks. I had to fall back on tables in some cases just to get a simple header including centered text with justified (left and right, respectively) flanking images.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
From the book's website:
The "CSS" in the title stands for "Cascading Style Sheets", a highly flexible way of formatting Web content. Core CSS, 2nd Edition takes a practical, pragmatic look at CSS, showing not only how you can make CSS1, CSS2 and Internet Explorer CSS extensions work for you now...
I can't imagine a serious book on CSS talking about IE CSS extensions. People interested in this topic should get Zeldman's book, or the latest O'Reilly CSS guide by Eric Meyer.
But in the real world, how many people really try to code decent, standard-following web pages, and how many just code for IE6. Even if the job can be done the right way isn't it easier to be lazy and neglect everyone but IE?
Are Gecko and Opera having a practical impact, yet?
How about handheld devices?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
CSS is still often not a practical solution when creating a web site. Unfortunately there are many things that are just too difficult to do with CSS - and I mean relatively simple layout issues.
CSS fanboys love to mock web sites that "still" use tables for their layouts. However, when you try to practically design a layout just using CSS and without tables, it proves pratically impossible. Even hardcore CSSers get all excited when they do simple things like layout pages in columns.
Try and find a big commercial web site that doesn't use tables for their layout. You won't find one. Is it because the web designers that work for these big multinationals are dumbasses, as some proponents of CSS will tell you? No. It's because CSS is crap for layout. I wish it wasn't but it is.
The more sensible CSS zealots seem to accept the "hybrid layout" concept. It's OK to use a table here and there if CSS browser bugs are causing too many problems. But the days of tables nested 10 levels deep and spacer gifs and crap like that are gone.
Has anyone else noticed the sudden rise of gradients and high-color icons and logos? They have begun appearing in huge numbers in webpages, software, and in new OSs. I installed Fedora Core the other day and was amazed by the beauty of it, but I wonder what the load is on the PC.
I remember reading this whitepaper in 2001 about how to do this, and why, and I wonder if it is powering the entire phenomenon.
With websites, correct layouts are even more critical to the look, and it looks like the techniques in this book would really assist with that.
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
I may be a bit strange in this, but I learned most of the CSS I know by reading theW3C Recommendation. I started reading W3C recommendations when I wanted to learn how to code SVG. Tutorials and examples were relatively rare on the web, so I just found the specification and went from there. I find W3C recommendations to be very readable, and I've since read the recommendations for CSS and every HTML since 4.0. My web design has changed dramatically (and my dislike for IE has deepened).
Has anyone else learned a web technology strictly from the specs?
The CSS3 Color Module includes an alpha value which can apply to all elements! I wonder how long it'll take browsers to implement it, though.
I just started learning CSS this past weekend, and I love it. The review of this book seems rather serendipitous to me, then. And yes, w3schools is a great place to get started.
Am I the only one who feels as if this is only a teaser for a real review? The reviewer mentions a "table of contents below" and his "score" which I don't see. Have I just never noticed that there's some other link to click on to see a full review, or am I freaking insane, or wtf?
#19845
88 errors in the html when validating with validator.w3.org/ in HTML 4.01 Transitional.
You'd think they would have done a better job, no?
Oh, and as someone mentioned before, css does not validate either.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Dreamweaver MX 2004 (which follows DW MX, which followed DW 4...) has excellent CSS support. It knows when to use div and when to to use span and has an easy interface for creating comprehensive CSS styles. It interprets CSS shorthand flawlessly. It has a convenient CSS reference. It also knows the difference between styles, pseudo-styles, and re-defining tags using CSS.
The WYSIWYG can display CSS elements far better than GoLive or FrontPage, though I mostly use the Code view.
Maybe you should try a more recent version of Dreamweaver. Also, you might be interested in the Dreamweaver Task Force which helped bring DW to greater standards compliance.
I find this link useful http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /workshop/author/dhtml/reference/dhtml_reference_e ntry.asp
Yes, I know we all hate microsoft -- but the reference clearly explains (at the bottom of each entry) whether the widget is CSS1/CSS2/IE-only compliant.
I could do my job without a reference like this, but it's nice to have something to peek at when you start feeling insecure about your abilities
I have never used only CSS to design a website solo for the fact it is still browser dependent. I find a good mix of common CSS, good old HTML, and common sense works best.
Rob
I haven't read this CSS book, but I've read a few, and the best ones always seem to have the same author. I can't imagine how one could be more clear and complete than Eric Meyer's Definitive Guide. He's also published a useful reference to CSS 2.0.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
Up to a few weeks ago, I would have laughed at the idea of CSS being used in serious web design for anything other than simple color and theme coordination. On commerical sites, CSS seemed the exception to the rule, and I scoffed at sites that used and tags to layout their page.
But that was before I actually saw the power and wisdom of incorporating CSS.
I recently updated my personal test site to use full CSS for the structure and design, and was very pleased to learn about the two key benefits of CSS website design: structure and format.
Structure:
For ages my own coding methods involved nested table within nested table, until the complexity of my pages got so complex that a simple updates became a gamble of helping or shredding the resulting page. Nested tables are also nearly impossible to coordinate for pages that must be scalable for accessibility, or simply stretching the viewable resolution for more modern video display sizes. Tables were originally meant for one thing: formatting text data, not carrying the workload of page structure. The truth is, it is much easier and precise to define a site's structure using CSS positioning. I am a minimist at heart when it comes to my source code, and CSS has not only helped to reduce clutter in my source code, but in most cases has reduced the source size by about 20%.
Format:
Using relative font sizes and design templates for formatting text not only makes universal page design easy, but it also makes browser loading faster, since CSS can be cached by local browsers while hard-coded or code includes must be reloaded every time the user clicks a link or refreshes the browser. That means reduced server load and increased load speeds for the user, too.
Now I realize, CSS is not the end-all and be-all of web design. There are some weaknesses, and the typical cross-browser support that needs to be worked out. But for the serious web designer, you can't ignore the elegance and the design concepts that make CSS a very powerful (and in some cases, superior) design tool.
If you are interested, the W3C site has some great CSS howto's and examples on replacing table-based structure on your site.
Computers are useless. They can only give answers. --Pablo Picasso
"Even hardcore CSSers get all excited when they do simple things like layout pages in columns."
Indeed, not only because of the struggle involved, but because of the great flexibility in using CSS instead of tables. It's not just "thank god I made a nice layout with CSS, it took me 7 hours!" but also "thank god I made a nice layout with CSS, now I can adjust it much more easily in the future and have far greater control than with any table hacks." And they are just that; hacks. The table tag was originally meant only for displaying data in a grid-like format (keep in mind HTML was originally for scientific documents).
And also we're all still learning. How many tablers got excited when they first figured they could use tables for page layout? A lot I bet. Now complex table layouts are all old-hat. Soon matured CSS layouts will be too, with the simplicity of layouts like this (check out the CSS, doesn't look too scary does it?).
... that said, the time it took to absorb (for example) position: relative; top: -2.5em; was really worth while for (dayjob=webmaster) me. As one tutorial (sorry, can't recall which) pointed out, with css one can position elements on a page with single-pixel precision... and make that work across most browsers (ie>5.5, moz>1.3, recent NS, Konqueror, Opera).
There are still issues: fonts are (render?) slightly larger in Moz 1.4 than in ie5.5 or 6. And fonts that look fine in Moz or ie>5 at 1024x768 on a 'doze box (read: MANY of our customers) look dreadful at a different rez on some other OS's. Browser makers still don't use identical DOMs, which makes margin:auto; or padding-left: nn; unreliable.
So, for now at least, you still do have to run a pragmatic test for x-resolution, x-browser, x-OS anomalies. But -- IM(not so)HO, css doesn't deserve the kind of condemnation the parent and others offer. With a little study, one can work around most browser glitches...
[this sig has been trunca
Seriously there are so many bugs and missing stuff from IE's implementation even of CSS 1 I fail to see how anyone can claim that its even remotely complient.
Here's just a few things off the top of my head:
The list goes on! And don't even get me started on the implementation of the DOM in IE, not to mention the security problems and other 'features' that also come along with it.
Why oh why can't it just go away!? If you don't believe me, google for this stuff, its all out there complete with hacks to get around some of it (though most of htem use non-standard MS extensions)
The Anti-Blog
The HTML 4.01 specification directly contradicts you:
It seems pretty clear that <table> elements aren't legal for layout purposes, with or without quotes around the word "legal".
This is the web; font sizes will vary depending on a whole range of factors and if you are expecting any particular size, then you are doing something wrong.
Since this discussion relates to CSS, here is a site with two excellent tutorials on CSS (bookmark it even if you don't use CSS now):
- CSS Positioning (5 pages)
- Using Style Sheets (7 pages)
These two might help save you money on buying a CSS book
Bare with me, I'm not a web designer. I have a candid question: why not use XML + XSLT instead of HTML + CSS? This way you would completely separate content from presentation, and you could also generate tables or whatever floats your boat in the resulting HTML.
:)
I guess the two approaches aren't incompatible: you could use XSLT to generate an HTML document that makes use of CSS... OK I guess I answered my own question...
Comments?
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
Woo hoo - I've been Slashdotted. And with a decent review! ;-) Fourth book lucky I suppose...
Okay, some explanations are in order for some of the questions I've run across:
Why Safari isn't covered: Safari was only available as a pretty buggy pre-release version while I was writing the book, and it only became 1.0 during printing (figures). I didn't think it worthwhile to include information on this browser until it became more stable, especially since it was obvious that many of its CSS-related bugs were being worked out in successive beta releases. Instead I've covered that info in the Web site, which also includes info on more recent versions of Konqueror and OmniWeb to which it is related through a common rendering engine.
Somebody mentioned that dealing with IE extensions was daft, and shouldn't be taken seriously. I decided to add them into this edition of the book in order to be thorough, and because somebody on Amazon had complained about the lack of any such listing in the first edition. The commentator is probably thinking about the various transition and filter effects thrown into the early editions of IE, which for the most part are about as useful as the beloved tag (they *are* covered however, at the end of the book). Far more interesting are the CSS extensions that have been added primarily for internationalization/localization issues. The CSS extensions Microsoft has added for dealing with things like Ruby layout for the Chinese-Japanese-Korean languages definitely should be taken seriously, as they are genuinely useful. What's more, many of MS' CSS extensions in this area have led the way towards what has become (or will likely become) the official standard. MS does get a basting for seriously jumping the gun on the W3C process, but if you want to starting working now on some CSS3-related code, there's plenty of IE extensions that lead the way that you can play with now.
And my apologies to those who have run into the database errors on the book's supporting Web site -- this is now fixed. Turns out my ISP had changed servers on me, which was the original cause of the problem.
If this were XML, we could define an or tag or even ; but this being X/HTML, we want to use id and class attributes to identify a line of text/code within given standards. The example given in parent, , usually means "error" or "important," so using class="error" or class="important" is far more meaningful to the coder than a deprecated tag, and can be made meaningful in any manner to the general audience with CSS.
>How useful is the meaningless element type in situations where CSS is not used (Lynx, Google, etc)?
- In Lynx, about as useful as the <font> tag, eh? But proper structure and hierarchical markup with headers, paragraphs, and properly identified <div> blocks will work wonders: making clear to searchbots what text is important, and giving disabled users an easily-navigable nonvisual UI. Then, the document can be easily (?) styled for prettiness in normal browsers, while still retaining an intelligible structure for other environments.
Even plain, unclassed <span> tags are useful when nested inside parent blocks, since these can be styled as descendant CSS selectors without suffering from acute classitis. Plus, <span> is standards-compliant, and <font> is deprecated.
I realise you're just trolling, but it's a point that deserves to be beaten into the heads of as many web designers as possible: if that one in ten is a guy who doesn't see too well, who surfs from work in a browser his IT tech has locked down settings in, or whatever, if he is the one in ten who thinks "hey, these people are nice enough to cater to me" and buys the product... your unfriendly website just got its ass handed to it by the competition.
Good designs work for everybody, and they give you a business advantage.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
You mean element type, not tag, and it would be just as meaningless. The rest of the web doesn't know anything about your markup scheme. Throwing the magic word "XML" at it doesn't change this. <span class="error"> doesn't mean anything to any program outside your organisation, nor does <error>. The whole point of using a shared markup language like HTML is that eveybody understands what the markup means and can do useful stuff with it.
CSS is an optional component of the WWW; you are treating it as a required component. Using meaningless code and then being able to kludge a certain presentation so people can understand it is no better than using <font>.
The value of CSS is that you can use meaningful markup without worrying about the presentation. If you don't bother using meaningful markup, then you haven't progressed at all, and may in fact be taking a step backwards (for instance, some people start using <div class="heading"> elements and similar).
How is a search engine to know that things like <span class="important"> are important? They don't. They do, however, know that <em> elements mean emphasis, etc. The <div> and <span> element types should be used as a last resort, not in place of element types like <em>