Slashdot Mirror
The Art and Science of CSS
nateklaiber writes "The Art and Science of CSS was a quick read (208 pages) and packed full of valuable code examples. Unlike other CSS books that teach you the specifics of CSS with vague examples (not vague in a bad way), this book teaches you specific examples and gives you extra resources. This book is somewhat of a cookbook of commonly used CSS methods. Each author brings their unique writing style to the table, and each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of design and its CSS and styling methods." Read below for the rest of Nate's review.
The Art and Science of CSS
author
Jonathan Snooks, Steve Smith, Jina Bolton, Cameron Adams, David Johnson
pages
208
publisher
Sitepoint
rating
5/5
reviewer
Nate Klaiber
ISBN
0975841971
summary
This book is a cookbook of commonly used CSS methods.
Chapter 1 starts with Headings. The author of this chapter gives a brief introduction to hierarchy and branding, and how you can achieve more control with your look and typography. As typography is discussed, he moves on to talk about image replacement and the many techniques available to us today. There is no perfect solution when it comes to image replacement, but the author does a great job of showing current methods, their advantages, and their disadvantages (including an in-depth section on sIFR).
Chapter 2 is all about Images. The author starts by showing you how to create a basic but aesthetically pleasing image gallery. The task at hand is to create the enlarged version, the thumbnail page, and the galleries page while keeping the markup lean and semantic. Each of these are put together very nicely with flair not usually seen in off the shelf image galleries. The author also discusses how to create images (in context) with captions, including a nice use of transparent PNGs. The authors creative use of captions give you options outside of the box (both semantically and philosophically) of normal captions that are seen all around the web.
Chapter 3 shows us that backgrounds don't have to be boring. This is a very simple chapter that discusses backgrounds of the past (repeating pictures, large pictures, etc), and then looks forward to the present in getting creative with your backgrounds. He uses a case study as an example, and it shows specifics of positioning and layering.
Chapter 4 jumps into Navigation. Different types of navigations are discussed (vertical, horizontal, tabbed, variable width, etc) and shown with specific examples. The author shows how to take from each of those to create advanced navigation systems using images and your semantic markup. I think that from this chapter a user could create an advanced navigation simply because the foundation is set pretty solid before he gets to the advanced section. This chapter goes hand-in-hand with chapter 1 when talking about image replacement.
Chapter 5 discusses the dreaded (sometimes feared) Forms. Forms come in all shapes and sizes and it is up to us to build them accordingly with the user in mind. The styling in this chapter spruces up what is a rather mundane form while giving you great flexibility and hooks to extend yourself. The author discusses the several different layout types (top aligned label, left aligned label, right aligned label) and shows how to enhance each. If you work with forms often, this chapter will help you whip up a clean interface for the task.
Chapter 6 is everybodys favorite chapter Rounded Corners. The author gives you an arsenal of tools (and knowledge) to attack the task of adding rounded corners. He discusses the different methods (horizontal stretching, vertical stretching, and full flexibility) and shows you how to achieve each keeping in mind the task of keeping the markup minimal and meaningful. We also get a brief glimpse into what CSS3 will have to offer us with multiple backgrounds per element.
Chapter 7 closes out the book with Tables. Tables still have a strong place in web development and the author shows you how to use tables properly (with semantic markup) and then how to give them a little visual jump-start and interaction. The markup presented here helps you give clear meaning to your tables as well as building with accessibility in mind (which is always important with tables, specifically). We round off the chapter looking at some interaction enhancements via Javascript that we can use with our tables (sorting, striping, and hovering).
Overall I found this book to be an excellent read. It was short and to the point, and gives the reader a great starting point (as well as inspiration). The book itself is well designed. My only qualms with the book is that the code examples are listed in full in many places, which gives less room for content related to the chapters. As I said in the beginning, this was a fairly quick read but well worth it. I would say that this is for an intermediate CSS developer, as specific CSS is not discussed in great detail but given to you as a way to achieve a specific design task. If you are familiar with CSS and need a quick way to achieve the tasks listed above, then this book is perfect for you.
You can purchase The Art and Science of CSS from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Chapter 2 is all about Images. The author starts by showing you how to create a basic but aesthetically pleasing image gallery. The task at hand is to create the enlarged version, the thumbnail page, and the galleries page while keeping the markup lean and semantic. Each of these are put together very nicely with flair not usually seen in off the shelf image galleries. The author also discusses how to create images (in context) with captions, including a nice use of transparent PNGs. The authors creative use of captions give you options outside of the box (both semantically and philosophically) of normal captions that are seen all around the web.
Chapter 3 shows us that backgrounds don't have to be boring. This is a very simple chapter that discusses backgrounds of the past (repeating pictures, large pictures, etc), and then looks forward to the present in getting creative with your backgrounds. He uses a case study as an example, and it shows specifics of positioning and layering.
Chapter 4 jumps into Navigation. Different types of navigations are discussed (vertical, horizontal, tabbed, variable width, etc) and shown with specific examples. The author shows how to take from each of those to create advanced navigation systems using images and your semantic markup. I think that from this chapter a user could create an advanced navigation simply because the foundation is set pretty solid before he gets to the advanced section. This chapter goes hand-in-hand with chapter 1 when talking about image replacement.
Chapter 5 discusses the dreaded (sometimes feared) Forms. Forms come in all shapes and sizes and it is up to us to build them accordingly with the user in mind. The styling in this chapter spruces up what is a rather mundane form while giving you great flexibility and hooks to extend yourself. The author discusses the several different layout types (top aligned label, left aligned label, right aligned label) and shows how to enhance each. If you work with forms often, this chapter will help you whip up a clean interface for the task.
Chapter 6 is everybodys favorite chapter Rounded Corners. The author gives you an arsenal of tools (and knowledge) to attack the task of adding rounded corners. He discusses the different methods (horizontal stretching, vertical stretching, and full flexibility) and shows you how to achieve each keeping in mind the task of keeping the markup minimal and meaningful. We also get a brief glimpse into what CSS3 will have to offer us with multiple backgrounds per element.
Chapter 7 closes out the book with Tables. Tables still have a strong place in web development and the author shows you how to use tables properly (with semantic markup) and then how to give them a little visual jump-start and interaction. The markup presented here helps you give clear meaning to your tables as well as building with accessibility in mind (which is always important with tables, specifically). We round off the chapter looking at some interaction enhancements via Javascript that we can use with our tables (sorting, striping, and hovering).
Overall I found this book to be an excellent read. It was short and to the point, and gives the reader a great starting point (as well as inspiration). The book itself is well designed. My only qualms with the book is that the code examples are listed in full in many places, which gives less room for content related to the chapters. As I said in the beginning, this was a fairly quick read but well worth it. I would say that this is for an intermediate CSS developer, as specific CSS is not discussed in great detail but given to you as a way to achieve a specific design task. If you are familiar with CSS and need a quick way to achieve the tasks listed above, then this book is perfect for you.
You can purchase The Art and Science of CSS from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
CSS seems to be nothing more than a way of making life easier for Webmasters, while making life suck for the actual consumers of web content.
Old: Download a hunk of HTML. Browser renders it. If the ISP's spotty (maybe the setup of that HTTP transaction fails 5% of the time), then one out of 20 times you don't get any HTML to render. So you reload and all's well. .css file, or two, or three, or four, sometimes from the same server, other times from some other server. If the ISP flakes out on you 5% of the time, and you have 5 different files to download, then (.95^5 = 0.76) about one time out of four, you get nothing, and have to reload.
New: Download a hunk of HTML. Download a separate
Old: Javashit is a security risk.
New: Javashit is still a security risk, but we'll make damn sure that none of our content renders correctly unless you turn it on, because how else are we going to run our browser-detection script that determines which of the half-dozen stylesheets (see above) we want your browser to use.
Old: Any font you like, as long as it's Helvetica, Courier, or Times Roman. But it'll be the version of Helvetica, Courier, and Times Roman that your OS designers knew would look good with its engine, at the sizes that look good on your display device.
New: Any font you like, as long as you're running the same DPI on your monitor as the web designer was running on his screen. If not, it'll look about two sizes too small, or two sizes too large. But it'll never look like the "right" default font that the pre-CSS browser would default to.
Seems like we'd just gotten away from "This Site Best Viewed At 800x600"... only to get back to "This Site Best Viewed At Two Font Sizes Smaller on 96-DPI monitors running at 2048x1536, Because The Web Designer Built It On A 72DPI monitor, But The Other Guy's Websites All Have To Be Two Font Sizes Smaller on 72-DPI 21-inch monitors running at 1280x960 Because The Website Designer Had A 2048x1536 96DPI monitor When He Wrote It".
The point of CSS was to get away from that bullshit, not make it more firmly-entrenched.
It depends. If it is theory, I like a book. It gets me away from a PC where I am in a coders mentality. If it is coding, then I agree online is the way to go.
BTW, too many coders consider themselves programmers...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Of course, you don't need a separate Windows licence to test Windows/IE6. MS makes a VM available:a milyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displa ylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
Okay, it's a VPC image, but even if you're not able to run VPC then you can convert it to a VMWare image...
Many templates on the web *are* really bad, but a quick visit to alistapart.com or csszengarden.com will give you some decent ones.
With all due respect to the people behind the CSS zen garden, it is most definitely not a good example of web design.
There's always been a contingent of web designers who hate new things coming along that they don't understand and don't want to learn. They dislike CSS for this reason (among other, more sensible reasons), and they rationalise this in a number of ways. At first it was lack of browser support. After browser support became more common, it morphed into the odd (if you know what you are doing) claim that it was impossible to create good-looking designs with CSS.
So along comes Dave Shea and sets up the zen garden, to which people contributed good-looking stylesheets. People were arguing for years that CSS meant boring designs, and the zen garden shut them up for good. Which was great, of course.
But don't for a second think that they are good examples of web design. They are not. Some of them are, of course. But the zen garden was an exercise in art, not design. Many of the zen garden designs look great, but are awful in terms of design. Remember that the difference between art and design is that design is supposed to be functional first and foremost. In this respect, many of the zen garden designs fail because they are unreadable, have awful contrast, are a pain to scroll, and all kinds of other mischief. But they look nice, and that was the point of the project.
If you are looking for ideas, then go ahead and use the zen garden for inspiration. But don't blindly follow what somebody has done and expect it to be good design, because there are many things that, if implemented on a real website, would utterly fail their visitors.