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CSS Cookbook
Posted by
samzenpus
on Mon Nov 20, 2006 03:21 PM
from the always-in-style dept.
from the always-in-style dept.
Michael J. Ross writes "Anyone involved with the coding of Web sites likely knows that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) should be used for styling the content of their sites' pages — setting text sizes and fonts, setting background colors, sizing margins, positioning images, and more. CSS allows the Web developer to specify the visual appearance of the site, separately from the HTML, and thus to be able to make changes in the future within a single stylesheet, rather than hunting through the HTML and modifying every occurrence of each affected element. The benefits of CSS are many, but so too can be the frustrations when the developer turns for help to CSS books heavy on theory and light on practical explanations. For every Web site 'cook' feeling the heat in their cyber kitchen, there is an ingredient that can help: CSS Cookbook." Read the rest of Michael's review,
Written by award-winning Web designer Christopher Schmitt, this book is published by O'Reilly Media, under the ISBN 0596005768, and is in its second edition, having been updated for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 1.5. The book has its own Web page on the publisher's site, offering the book's table of contents, the index, Appendix D ("Styling of Form Elements," in PDF format), and links for reading and submitting book reviews/comments, as well as reading and reporting errata (there are none, as of this writing).
The book's 538 pages are organized into 12 chapters, which cover the major areas of interest to the Web developer: CSS overview, typography, images, page elements, lists, links and navigation, forms, tables, page layouts, printable pages, hacks and workarounds, and design considerations. Appendix A briefly describes some of the better online CSS resources, including tutorials, design guides, discussion groups, technical references, and tools, such as the W3C validators. The next two appendices cover CSS 2.1 properties, proprietary extensions, selectors, pseudo-classes, and pseudo-elements.
The fourth and last appendix, on the styling of form elements, details how 20 CSS properties affect eight form elements, as displayed within Windows Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, 6, and 7; Mac Safari 2; Windows and Mac Firefox 1.5; Windows and Mac Netscape Navigator 7.2; and Opera 8.5. The form elements considered are: checkboxes, file upload elements, radio buttons, text fields, multiple options, select elements, submit buttons, and text areas. The author does not explain exactly what page elements are meant by "File Upload" (at the beginning of the appendix) or "File Input" (the actual section title). Presumably he is referring to the file display field and Browse button, and not the file locator dialog box, which is determined by the browser and operating system. More importantly, he does not explain what is meant by "multiple options" nor "select elements," and neither term is listed in the book's index. Future editions of the book would benefit by beginning every element's section with an example, showing the code as well as the element's appearance on a Web page. Despite this obvious omission, this appendix could prove a godsend to anyone concerned with how these various types of elements are affected by CSS within these eight major browser versions. As noted earlier, the appendix can be downloaded for free.
HTML/CSS books generally fall into two broad categories: Introductory books are usually sufficient for beginners, because they cover the basics. But they are typically useless to the veteran developer who is struggling to understand why Internet Explorer is mucking up yet another page that looks fine in Firefox, Opera, and Safari — and how to work around the problem. Advanced books assume that the reader already has a relatively solid understanding of the technologies, and uses that basis as a foundation from which to explore sophisticated design techniques. But even those books prove inadequate for the developer who is simply wondering how to best use pure CSS to do such presumably straightforward tasks as positioning some images horizontally, with small captions centered underneath each one. In fact, many of those advanced books seem to have little interest in clearly explaining how the reader can do what the author has done, largely because the sample projects and their source listings are too long and involved, thus burying the critical HTML and CSS in pages of code.
There is clearly a great need for one or more HTML/CSS books aimed at the developer who already understands the basics, and wants to apply that knowledge for building robust Web pages, all while following defensible best practices. The O'Reilly "Cookbook" titles are intended to fill that gap, by presenting the material in the form of recipes, each comprising a brief statement of the problem to be solved, a summary of the solution, and a discussion of the solution's details. Oftentimes additional resources are referenced, in a "Sea Also" subsection, which might have one or more links to relevant Web sites. The discussion subsections usually have sample code, in addition to a figure showing the code's output.
Possibly the greatest benefits of the cookbook format, is that it forces the author to clearly state the purpose of each section, and then to get right to the point of how to achieve that purpose. This prevents the meandering seen in many of the advanced design books, which is the main reason why they can be so frustrating for the developer who wants to quickly find out how to perform a specific task on a Web page, such as the image positioning task mentioned earlier. Possibly the biggest downside to the cookbook format is that it results in contrived problem statements, such as the very first one in CSS Cookbook: "Problem — You want to use CSS in your web pages." Is that truly a problem? Is it not much more a goal or task, than some sort of problematic difficulty?
Yet aside from any misleading subsection titling, the recipe format does cause any (largely) expository material in a technical book to get chopped up into somewhat artificial pieces. It is more noticeable in the first chapter of this particular book, titled "General," in which Schmitt explains the fundamentals of CSS: selectors, classes and IDs, properties, the box model, style sheets, comments, shorthand properties, floating images, absolute and relative positioning, and using CSS with the more common page development tools. As the author gets into more advanced topics — for which individual subsections can stand more on their own — the recipe format works fine. One advantage is that the section titles end up being detailed enough that the reader can, in most cases, quickly find the relevant section to address their needs.
Overall, this book is a fine addition to O'Reilly's growing list of programming titles. However, like all books, it is not perfect. It does not cover all of the more common tasks that the average Web programmer might want to accomplish — but it does hit the bulk of them. Sadly, all of the figures in the book are in black and white, including those displaying colors on the sample Web pages. Shades of gray are just not optimal. Fortunately, in most cases, the crux of the technique is discernible. In addition, the sample code has too many instances where layout is achieved using tables, and not pure CSS. Lastly, the book's index — similar to that of so many other technical books nowadays — could certainly use some beefing up. After all, if the reader cannot find the desired material using the table of contents, the index is their last hope, before resorting to time-wasting page flipping.
In terms of HTML and CSS information, the topics are well chosen, and the coverage of browser hacks and workarounds is excellent. Also, the most critical parts of the code are helpfully bolded. For those readers completely unfamiliar with JavaScript, it is used only where unavoidable. The book's material is neatly presented, and the author's writing style is straightforward and approachable.
On balance, CSS Cookbook is to be recommended to any developer looking for a CSS guide that is concise, clearly written, well-illustrated, and addresses the most common challenges in building Web pages.
Michael J. Ross is a computer consultant, freelance writer, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter. He can be reached at www.ross.ws, hosted by SiteGround.
You can purchase CSS Cookbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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How did they get the book out so fast (Score:2)
Re:How did they get the book out so fast (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think the issue is that there were substantial, backwards-broken changes to IE7's implementation of CSS. Firefox and Opera were pretty close to correct from the beginning, so web developers don't have to code directly for those versions of those browsers (as much--I'm sure tiny differences exist).
And that's not even considering that IE has a much greater marketshare than the rest of the browsers, meaning any book which is going to talk about web development really has to discuss getting
Re:How did they get the book out so fast (Score:4, Informative)
Not to mention, IE7 came out before Firefox 2.0...
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Re:How did they get the book out so fast (Score:4, Informative)
If nothing else, they'd rather be the first guys in the shelf with an IE 7 book and be wrong than the last guys and be right. An author friend of mine quit writing technical books precisely because she hated losing market share to badly-written books that came out sooner.
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Re:How did they get the book out so fast (Score:4, Informative)
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In this case, for example, a lot of people probably feel they need something on the new tech so that their bosses can know that they're ready to supp
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I'm not knocking audio books, they have a time and a place, but they weren't meant to supplant reading altogether.
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Probably. From what I've noticed, most average Joes will go to the bookstore to get (say) "a CSS book". They flip through all the CSS books on the shelf, and pick whichever one seems to do the best job of covering whatever aspect of CSS they're trying to get a handle on at the time. Sometimes, they just grab the O'Reilly/Wrox/Addison Wesley/
Well this sounds promising... (Score:3, Insightful)
Use of hacks? Sweet!
Hacks are a bad practice that has been challenged and debated for a while now. I though, and correct me if I am wrong, that conditional HTML statements were the best way to go. Nowadays, why would someone want a book that is going to lead you to write non-compliant code.
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I though, and correct me if I am wrong, that conditional HTML statements were the best way to go. Nowadays, why would someone want a book that is going to lead you to write non-compliant code.
It depends upon what your application for the code is. As for why anyone would write non-compliant code, that's easy... most users will be using a non-complaint browser (some version of IE).
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You can write perfectly compliant code which will display correctly in IE6 (a non-compliant browser).
I don't think this is true. You can come very close with IE6 and IE7, but I don't think it is technically possible to write a completely compliant page that works in both and uses proper CSS and XHTML. I could be wrong.
The way to do it is to use only those subsets of CSS and XHTML which are correctly interpreted by IE6. IE6 is compliant in many things. This may seem limiting but it's a million times bet
Re:Sounds logical, but isn't (Score:4, Informative)
You are wrong. There are a few different factors at play here:
The anonymous coward was completely correct - it's perfectly possible to use valid code with Internet Explorer by simply limiting yourself to the subset of code that works in Internet Explorer and is defined by a W3C specification. This can be extremely frustrating at times, but it's usually better than the alternative.
In addition, you shouldn't really focus on the XHTML bit. There are very few people who actually need XHTML, and despite the buzz, it has nothing to do with standards compliance or CSS. XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.01 are functionally identical in these respects.
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You are wrong. There are a few different factors at play here:
I'm aware of all the factors you site, but I don't think I've ever gotten such code to work in IE and validate. There was always some weird hack with the scoping or something, which may simply be the validator not agreeing with all the specs, but I'm not really expert enough to judge.
In addition, you shouldn't really focus on the XHTML bit. There are very few people who actually need XHTML, and despite the buzz, it has nothing to do with sta
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Can you give an example? I do this on a regular basis without really thinking about it these days.
It depends on your toolset. I'm in a similar situation, and switching between HTML and XHTML is a cou
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The issue with coding is not compliance with CSS standards (those are well published [w3schools.com]) but rather in how the various browsers interpret those standards.
The code is standard; the parsing and rendering methodologies are not.
I, for one, appreciate a book that addresses these non-standard behaviors when parsing standard code. The review posted by samzenpus exposes these insights, and contrasts them from the plethora of "standards reference" books. (many from the same publisher [oreilly.com])
Sometimes, hacks ar [incutio.com]
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Please don't link to the sleazy W3Schools when referencing the work of the W3C. They have nothing to do with the W3C [w3.org] and are not responsible for the CSS specifications.
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Actually, I see people mistaking W3Schools for the W3C fairly regularly. Whether it is your intent or not, you help promote this misconception when you link the way that you do.
It's not just me that has a problem with them [mozillazine.org].
Conditional comments are unmaintainable (Score:3, Insightful)
Many designers would love to use conditional comments if they had CSS block granularity. Instead, the idiots at Microsoft only implemented them at the HTML level, making a maintenance mess.
Conditional comments would be so wonderful if you could put them in a .css file like this:
That way, the purpose of each MSI
The problem with these types of books... (Score:2, Insightful)
My work got me a few CSS books and when the boss asked if I'd read them, I indicated I'd used them briefly for reference, but no, not as such. He wasn't too impressed until I pointed out the recent sites I'd created, all validated, all exactly to spec and all AA accessible, not to mention extreme light wei
Does any major site use pure CSS? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Does any major site use pure CSS? (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people with bad habits writing HTML tutorials too.
One of the big problems is software developers who have a basic grounding in "bad" HTML and use it to lay out programatically generated sites. Developers in general don't want to bother to learn CSS - they seem to think it's the sugar on top - "just" a graphic design thing. So you see a lot of crap HTML work out there - and a lot of table layout.
For a sublime, pure-CSS experience (make sure and load some of the stylesheets on the right-hand side), check out http://www.csszengarden.com/ [csszengarden.com]
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I agree with everything you said. I'd just like to add that many people want to look for excuses not to learn CSS. If you are doing a quick one up site, sure do it the quickest way possible (nvu or dreamweaver using tables), but if it is something that is to last the stays of time CSS is soo much more flexible. If you didn't check out the csszengarden link [csszengarden.com] then do so now. All the designs have the exact same html. The only thing changed be
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I'll grant you that tables are often employed to do what cross-platform CSS seemingly can not; yet, there are also behaviors CSS can do that are not possible with tables.
Yet, I will stipulate that CSS alone can often emulate, or even improve upon, the cumulative effect of rigid-table design. (even without using the DreamWeaver "layer" implementation, though I believe it will ultimately come around anyway)
The explanation I hear again and again is that Table v. CSS is a "high-road,
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At a casual glance... (Score:2, Informative)
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The tables are still a preferred method of laying out information. However DIVs are taking off I think, for example in two of my latest projects we use tables and divs, using table rows to present rows/cols of data and using divs to position portions of the page that are not just records of data. We also use divs inside table columns in one of the project to achieve layout flexibility.
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ESPN.com had a high-profile conversion [mikeindustries.com] in 2003 that was supposed to reduce its load time and file size signficantly. A peek at the front page today shows that, in fact, the site is contained within divs. On the downside, however, it appears that the front page designers have gotten lazy -- currently the page does not validate against its embedded doctype.
As for why tables-based layouts are done 'everywhere', it could be because of a lot of reasons: no time to do a proper redesign, no desire to mess with a
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It never did. I distinctly remember when it was first launched, Mike did a couple of interviews saying, in effect, "Aren't standards great!", follow
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Ah, now that you say that, I recall that. Thanks for the refresher.
Ah well, at least I could use my incorrect recollection to successfully push for a standards reform at my job... ;-)
Re:Does any major site use pure CSS? (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution, of course, is to rely on a bunch of hacks to present slightly different rules to different browsers, forcing all of them to display the correct bounding-box, margin, padding etc. And now we're writing unsupported, undocumented nasty hacks that will come back to bite us each time a browser is updated, which as a previous poster pointed out is an obvious no-no.
Nested tables are not elegant, they're not CSS-based, they're not extensible etc. But they work. A 100px cell displays as at 100 px pretty darn reliably, without a laundry-list of hacks and hints. A menu placed to the left of the content STAYS to the left of the content, it doesn't suddenly display after the content block. From a practical standpoint, tables are simply more robust and more reliable than CSS-based layouts, at least with the flakey browser support CSS layouts have. I've pulled lots of hair out to get my CSS layouts as good as they are, because I believe in CSS, but I think a smarter man would have used tables.
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CSS degrades far better than tables (Score:4, Insightful)
The entire point of CSS is to "degrade well." You've confused "displays identically on mainstream browsers with large resolutions" for actually degrading gracefully. To take a single example I have a lot of experience with, those beautiful table layouts fall apart on small displays. Maybe you can reasonably assume modern laptops and desktops have a resolution of 800x600, but what about my phone (128 x 160) or my Palm (320x480). A table based layout falls apart. But a CSS based layout using floating sidebars degrade reasonably gracefully on my palm. My phone doesn't support CSS and I frequently disable CSS on my Palm for speed. In both cases the CSS based layout may be dull and sequential, but it's perfectly readable. For web sites about presenting useful information this is great. Table based layouts turn into hard to read messes. Now my Palm's browser has a great feature that tries to detect tables-as-layout and linearizes them, and it's pretty good, but it occasionally trashed actual tabular data. Because people use tables to mean two totally different things ("I want this thing exactly here for visual impact" vs "This is tabular data"), my Palm can't try to present a graceful degredation.
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Re:Does any major site use pure CSS? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's easier to use something you know rather than something you don't. A lot of web developers are more comfortable with table layouts than with CSS because they have more experience with them, and the stupider, lazier ones use this as an excuse to not bother with CSS. And, because they continue to eschew CSS, they just get more and more experience with table layouts and the problem gets worse. This is only offset by new developers entering the field, the old ones retiring, and the smart ones switching.
It's because CSS is stupid. (Score:2)
CSS 3 looks like it might finally be sane, but you know CSS 3-supporting browsers won't be widely for years and years. I don't blame people
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Re:Does any major site use pure CSS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Every single CSS methond has some kind of drawback that requires some kind of hack to fix if it's even fixable at all.
Yes, there's a great deal to be said about separating presentation from content, but like OOP, CSS is no silver bullet.
They could solve about 99% of the things tables are used for by simply having a "float: center", but even if they did that it would take like 10 years for all the different web browsers to implement it and you'd still be supporting all the old ways, which is why people still use tables.
Don't get me wrong, I really try and I use the books I've purchased on CSS and website design and online resources including news groups and so forth, and I'd really rather use CSS than tables (and I usually accept a layout that I'm not always happy with just to do it), but this whole "tables are evil" thing will only be true when CSS can do the layouts you can so easily accomplish with tables.
And contrary to your assertation; the kind of simple "center this" kind of layout I'm referring to doesn't give you a nightmare of nested tables and cells that are hard to figure out where they are.
Here's an example: a simple centered box that grows or shrinks in width based on dynamic content. A simple unordered list, for example. If the options are small, the entire table is small and centered. If some of the items are wordier, the table automatically grows wider to accomodate the longer list item. If you don't want the table to grow too wide just for the one option (you'd rather it wrap before it gets to 100%), you can put it in a div that narrows the maximum width of the table. In this case, it could simply be a single cell table.
In CSS, you don't get dynamic width based on the content - you get a percentage width or a specific width. The only way to center it in this case is to use javascript (or you could aproximate it with server side scripting). Believe it or not, after weeks of debate on the CSS newsgroup, that was the answer I got: don't use tables, use scripting to compensate. I'm sorry, but no.
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A book? (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, the only way for me to know a particular cross-browser CSS approach works is to actually test it on every browser I can. Kinda hard to do that with a book.
And if these guys were real CSS gurus, they would have written their book in XML and CSS and used Prince to convert it and then open sourced the book code.
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Some people (myself included) just like to sit back and read a book to give themselves some familiarity with the problems before they get down to doing the actual work. This is especially true of a cookbook, which is less of a reference than a source of neat ideas.
I can't
some improvements for you (Score:5, Funny)
javascript:self.close()
<![endif]>
<!--[if IE 6]>
javascript:self.close()
<![endif]>
<!--[if IE 5]>
javascript:self.close()
<![endif]>
<!--[if lte IE 4]>
javascript:self.close()
<![endif]>
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Treat old browsers to plain looking sites. (Score:3, Informative)
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There are quite a few designs I've created that I couldn't do with the old table-within-table-within-table sludge and morass we used to have to work with. And they're easily changeable if I have to revamps the look of the site without having to mess with the (properly separated and semantically organized) html or the content in the database. CSS is extraordinarily flexible.
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Sure it does.
The book belongs to Samuel Its. It's Its' book; his name is written inside its cover.