Archive for September, 2007
Pro CSS Techniques (Book review)
September 25, 2007 [10:41 pm] No CommentsWhen three top web designers sit down together and write a book about CSS then it must be a good one. That is exactly what has happened in this case. Jeff Croft, Ian Lloyd and Dan Rubin have created a perfect book which is ideal for web designers with medium knowledge who would like to wider their CSS spectrum. I am sure that even lots of professionals with couple of years experiences can find a full bunch of useful tips and tricks in this book
At the beginning of the book you will find the natural basics which are required when you are working with CSS. So called “best practice”. Things like semantic markup and the cascade itself. I have found specially very interesting the scoring table which describes the priority of the selectors and the order in which styles are applied.
In the fifth chapter guys talks about organizing your style sheets and about dividing them into different files based on the type. For example typography, layout. I do it the same way on all my projects but I have found recently lot’s of discussions about http requests, specially from yahoo guys and they are basically saying that the more files is the browser requesting the longer the time of page loading is even if the files are small. I think the web browser is capable of receiving only two files at the same time. So I have this dilemma if I should continue using this system.
Chapter six describes probably the hardest part when you are working with CSS and it is browser hacks and workarounds. The standard way dealing with browser problems is for example targeting different versions of IE with conditional comments. I do use them quite often but I find myself fixing problems in IE6 only very rarely. I think once you realize what causes the problems you will try to avoid these situations in the first place.
Chapter seven is called layouts and you can find here lots of ideas for creating liquid, elastic and fixed layouts or how to use floats properly. Floating is something I use a lot. I somehow found it very practical.
The next chapter is about typography. Another one of my favorite subjects. You can see here lots of different typefaces, tips how to use kerning and leading with CSS.
Last part of the books describes how to style your tables and forms and how to style for print and other media.
So that’s about it. You have again my high recommendations for this book.
Thank you Jeff, Ian and Dan!
- Rating: ★★★★★
- Reviewed: Sept 25, 2007
- Book’s home page: Pro CSS Techniques
