The CSS Anthology 169
The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks | |
author | Rachel Andrew |
pages | 380 |
publisher | SitePoint |
rating | 8 |
reviewer | Bruce Lawson |
ISBN | 0957921888 |
summary | Structured Q&A guide for CSS beginners |
Author's credentials
Andrew is a long-term member of the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and programmer, technical project manager, technical team leader/senior developer and webmaster, according to her own bio.
Who's the book for?
The book's subtitle is somewhat misleading. There probably are 101 tips'n'tricks (I didn't count) but it's not the random miscellany that it implies. The information is structured so that a n00b could become proficient by reading the book from start to finish (I tested this out on a colleague). The tips'n'tricks structure does allow you to find what you're looking for in a hurry. The table of contents is easily scanned, and there is an excellent index.
The book doesn't offer advice on how to sex up the beauty of your site. That's fine for me; my current work involves replicating someone else's designs using xhtml and CSS, and as a coder I'm pathologically unable to design the type of showcases that you see at the CSS Zen Garden. A graphic designer might therefore find this book hard work; it jumps straight into a discussion of syntax, and there's occasional geek-directed statements (CSS supports multi-line C-style comments). Similarly, if you're completely new to html, this book probably isn't for you; there's lots of references to pre-CSS ways of working which could potentially be mystifying. Unusually for CSS books, there's a refreshing lack of polemic telling you why you should use style-sheets. If I read another history of the browser wars in a technical book, I shall scream.
So the book's constituency would seem to be those who know how to present information via html, and wish to take advantage of the smaller filesizes, greater flexibility and logical separation of the presentation layer from the mark-up that the (x)html/ CSS combination offers. The logical purity is my personal reason for moving to Web Standards; the trauma of writing text processing applications with VAX Fortran in the late '80s left me with the propensity to weep when I see html as sorely abused I mangled dear old Fortran.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.
Anthology kicks off in the conventional way for CSS books - controlling fonts and colours, styling hyperlinks, headings and the like. Each chunk is structured as a problem (How do I remove the indented left margin from a list?), a solution and sample code, and generally a discussion of related applications of the code, compatibility issues, accessibility notes etc. This is a pretty compact method of explication, and the basics of styling, syntax, pseudo-class order and the like are romped through in 40 pages, but not glossed over. The key to this is that Anthology assumes you know what you want to do, and shows you how to do it.
Chapter 4 (Navigation) is where the real meat begins - making navigation menus that are solely html unordered lists (because a menu is logically a list of links) and styling with CSS, adding rollover effects, styling navigation as buttons, changing the styling to a horizontal navbar, or even Amazon-style tabs without changing the mark-up. I suspect that, although these are techniques that can be found in most CSS books, the brevity and simplicity of the explanation will be revelatory to many. Chapter 5 (Tabular Data) may come as a surprise to those who mistakenly believe that web standards disallows the use of html tables, as it shows how to style tabular data - the examples are a spreadsheet and a calendar. Chapter 6 repeats the trick with that most mundane aspect of web development, the form.
Chapter 7 (Browser and Device Support) is about real-world CSS development. Unlike most books which instruct you to test in loads of browsers and leave it at that, this chapter lists all the main permutations of OS and browser (including tips on installing multiple versions of IE/ Win), and begins discussion of the tried and tested hacks to hide styles from Netscape 4, IE etc. All of this information is available on the web -- but for a newbie who isn't yet aware that it's possible to hide styles from certain browsers, it's a great way to introduce them to the murky practices of real-world CSS development. What's also refreshing in a computer book for n00bs is a discussion of how to seek help on lists and forums, with a guide to etiquette.
Chapter 8 (CSS Positioning and Layout) is where the stuff that stumps many a table-based designer begins. Along with fonts and colours etc, CSS can lay out the stuff on your page. I'm unsure about the success of this chapter; the Q&A structure is great if you're looking to build one of the sites that are explained (and the list is pretty comprehensive), but I came to the chapter hoping to cure a couple of bugs I'd found in a project I'd previously semi-successfully laid out with absolute positioning (A.P.).
Generally, I layout using floats as I also write the html, so it's easy to ensure that the markup spits out <div>s (sections) in the left-to-right, top-to-bottom order that I want to lay them out in. Suddenly, I had two projects that required A.P. for the first time, as it was not cost-effective to change the way that the client's CMS spat out the markup, so AP was required to position sections on the page regardless of where they appeared in the markup.
Anthology served me fine until I tested the page in IE and the layout was off. Nothing in the book gave me any pointers, and in the end I gave up Googling and just used a hack which exploits an IE parser bug to serve different co-ordinates to IE, after finding the hack co-ordinates through trial and error:
#APthing {position:absolute; top:34px; left: 758px; width:108px; height:88px;}
* html #APthing {position:absolute; top:19px; left: 785px;} /*for IE */
OK, so there may be a simple mistake I'm making -- but then, as far as absolute positioning goes, I'm the kind of newbie at whom this book is aimed, and I imagine that others will make the same mistake that I did. If the book had explained where I was going wrong, or given me the above hack, I'd've spent less time with Google and more time with Guinness.
Chapter 9 (Experimentation, Browser Specific CSS and Future Techniques) is successful, except for one small gripe. I'm glad that the author, although a member of the Web Standards Project, isn't an uber-purist. (I'm of the opinion that a little invalid code, if it's the only way to get the job done, isn't a hanging offense). So she shows how to implement IE-only proprietary CSS that can make colourful scrollbars, should you wish to do this. There's also a Mozilla-only CSS trick to allow curved edges to CSS boxes, which I implemented on my homepage that very evening.
However (here's the gripe), the most useful technique shown is one which allows fully-CSS flyout menus that don't rely on JavaScript. The author notes that it won't work for most people, as IE incorrectly restricts the hover pseudo-class to <a> tags only, while the CSS requires hovering over <li> elements.
Well, Yes and No. There's a well-documented and elegant hack which allows a proprietary Microsoft behaviour to be attached to the CSS that attaches a small JScript that corrects the IE bug, and thus allows this extremely useful CSS-only flyout menu to work in IE. I've used the technique myself when required to mimic the look and feel of a client's site while making it DDA/ADA accessible, and it works perfectly. To me, the omission of the IE hack from Anthology is an unfortunate oversight.
Summary
There's a couple of flaws in the book, though I suspect that in order to explain them, I've over-emphasised them. All in all, it's a solid, professional no-B.S. way for someone with a code-oriented mind to get them up to speed, satisfactorily and quickly; a motivated reader could be churning out standards-compliant, bandwidth-friendly sites after a few hour's experimentation. Ordering the book from the publisher's website was a good experience and, unusually, they have a money-back guarantee. As I said, I wish that I'd had access to Anthology when I was learning.
You can purchase The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I like it.... (Score:5, Interesting)
CSS is annoying (Score:3, Interesting)
With...
It fits more with the philosophy that colors and other styles should be in once place and one place only. CSS follows that OK right now, that is, we can put all those things in the same document, but wouldn't it be great if the document itself adhered to the same principle?
That problem seems to me one of the biggest in CSS. It makes things cluttered, take up 10 times as much space as they otherwise might, and makes for an illogical thought process. The designer doesn't think: I'll go through each element in the page and make them blue, but rather: I want this this and this to be blue. Anyway, just a thought.
Re:CSS is annoying (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree.
What CSS *really* needs is variables. For example:
Having variables like this would cut down on a lot of the maintenance headaches that CSS can cause.
yes there is a way, just backwards:CSS is annoying (Score:1, Interesting)
you can assign a set of attributes to multiple IDs and classes.
also remember that the "cluttered look" and extra space is not really such a bad thing. as long as the style sheet is external, "readability" and ease of use and editing is more important.
many people can make CSS do cool stuff, but few are using it properly - too many IDs, setting IDs when a class would suffice, using inline styles repeatedly, hacks and whacks with margins and negative padding to fix display issues instead of using the proper assignments.
I love that CSS is gaining so much popularity, but people are already starting to crap out poorly planned and non standard code that is almost as bad as tables and "shims" (spacers, transpix, whatever).
CSS should make sitewide changes easier and quicker, read the spec! follow the spec! check the W3C! dont just follow the hacks of blogs and sites, learn to use the great tools properly, sure you can pound nails with a wrench, but when you have a pneumatic hammer - why bother! just wait for CSS 3! (and wait ^3 times longer for browsers other than Moz to comply with the standard)
how hypocritical, i say to my self as I look at all the crappy "s" i have strewn about this post
-nappingcracker
Why I hate CSS (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll leave aside whether it's a good idea to have a dynamic web page made up of three *different* scripting systems in one document, and just go on to mention two of the things that bug me most:
Firstly, it does not seem to be possible (unless I just haven't found it yet, please feel free to correct me) to say that I want style FOO to be the same as style BAR except with these changes. i.e., true hierarchical styles. Any word processor worthy of the name supports this. It allows you to make sure that each important style property is defined in exactly one, central place.
Secondly, CSS' styling system is very, very limited. How do you say, I want this container to be big enough to fit this string into? You can't. This means that any kind of layout where you have sized objects with text in them --- such as columns, or a header --- has to be specified in fixed values. You can't say, I want a graphic followed by a line of text followed by something that fills all the rest of the space. (You've got ems and ens and points but frankly, they're not useful.)
I do think that CSS is currently the best thing around for formatting HTML; I've also used it with moderate success for formatting raw XML. It just makes me cringe when I think how good it could be, and how lousy it actually is... I keep having this urge to write my own formatting engine in Javascript, and that's never good.
Re:CSS is annoying (Score:1, Interesting)
What we REALLY need are Cascading Javascript Sheets [www.nic.fi]