CSS Pocket Reference 87
Michael J. Ross writes "For Web developers who appreciate the value of separating Web content from its presentation, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has proved a godsend, because it allows all of the styling of a Web site to be organized in CSS files separate from the site's semantic content, in HTML files (possibly dynamically generated). Yet to make this styling power possible, CSS must incorporate a long list of syntax elements, including hundreds of selectors, properties, and values. Thus it can be quite handy for the developer to have on hand a concise summary of CSS, such as the CSS Pocket Reference, authored by Eric A. Meyer." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.
The book was published by O'Reilly Media on 5 October 2007, under the ISBNs 0596515057 and 978-0596515058. CSS itself has evolved along with other Web technologies, and this book is now in its third edition, having been updated to reflect the ongoing changes in CSS; the book now covers CSS2 and CSS2.1. On the book's Web page, O'Reilly offers an online table of contents, as well as ways for the visitor to view and submit errata (none as of this writing) and reviews for the book. Unlike most technical publishers, O'Reilly now makes available previews of their books' contents, in the form of a table of contents with links to the first few paragraphs of each section, including tables and illustrations.
| CSS Pocket Reference, 3rd Edition | |
| author | Eric A. Meyer |
| pages | 168 |
| publisher | O'Reilly Media |
| rating | 8/10 |
| reviewer | Michael J. Ross |
| ISBN | 0596515057 |
| summary | A concise reference book for CSS. |
Despite the growth in the number of elements in CSS, and the attention paid to each one of them by the author of CSS Pocket Reference, the book is still small enough to fit in a pocket, at only 168 pages. The book's material is organized into 18 unnumbered sections, preceded by some notes on the book's typographical conventions, and followed by an essential index. The bulk of the material is found in the Property Reference section. Other sections explain how to add styles to HTML and XHTML pages; CSS rule structure and style precedence, including inheritance and the cascade; element classification and display roles; visual layout; rules on floating and positioning; and table layout. Subsequent sections cover CSS value types and units, and selectors, including some of the newest additions to CSS, such as the adjacent sibling selector and the language attribute selector. Just before getting into the details on properties, Eric Meyer discusses pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements, which have made it possible for Web developers to create rather robust and attractive site navigation using CSS exclusively, without any need to resort to images and JavaScript for rollover effects and other navigation eye candy.
For each element of CSS that is covered in all of the sections mentioned above, the types of information presented to the reader can vary, depending upon the category of element. But they generally include the element's possible values, a default value, what elements it can apply to, whether it is inherited, its computed value, a brief description of the element, at least one example illustrating its usage, what browsers support it, and oftentimes a note on its usage. Consequently, this new edition of the book, like its predecessors, should prove more than adequate for most CSS reference needs.
As with any computer book, there are several ways in which this one could be improved. Any reader using the book to look up a particular element, has two possible ways of doing so: They could first consult the index, and, assuming the element is listed there, go straight to the page indicated. But most readers, knowing that the elements in each section are listed alphabetically, will probably open up the book near the front or the back, and begin flipping backward or forward, respectively, hoping to spot the element of interest as quickly as possible, given its alphabetical ordering. That individual will likely immediately spot an obvious problem with the book: The pages have no running titles (the words that indicate the first element discussed on that page, and typically listed at the very top of each page). Inclusion of such running titles in the next edition of the book, would make it much faster to use.
Another valuable addition would be some sort of table listing all of the CSS elements and their level of support within the most commonly used Web browsers and, in the case of Internet Explorer, the most commonly used versions of the browser. Also, on page 48 of the book, at the beginning of the Property Reference section, it has a subhead of "Visual Media," which suggests that there are other subheads within that section, for other media types; but I was unable to find any.
All of these problems concern the publisher's choice of material. My last criticism concerns the layout of that material in the print version of the book. Because this diminutive volume has narrow pages, and they are tightly glued together in the binding, it is imperative that the publisher of such a book provide plenty of white space in the inner margins (those closest to the binding), so the reader does not have to crack open the book too much in order to read the text closest to the binding. Repeatedly opening up the book far enough to read those inmost words, will over time weaken and eventually destroy the binding. In contrast, a small reference book like this has no need for much outer margin. Sadly, O'Reilly got it backwards with this volume, with relatively wide and useless outer margins, and inadequate inner margins.
Aside from the aforementioned flaws — all of which can be remedied in the future — CSS Pocket Reference is a compact and neatly organized gem of a book, packed with information of value to busy Web programmers.
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.
You can purchase CSS Pocket Reference, 3rd Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Re:I like it (Score:5, Funny)
So the book is just like CSS in general.
Browsers? (Score:4, Informative)
I hate setting up something, then spending hours looking up workarounds for some random tag or other on IE.
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Dude, it's been like three hours. Are you OK in there?
Re:Browsers? (Score:5, Funny)
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I've stopped bothering to spend more than 5 minutes figuring out any Firefox bug. Granted, my pages aren't widely used, mostly testing stuff out and internal school pages, but Firefox is more trouble than it's worth. All the public computers here have IE, so no one can really complain anyway.
It's coding for one web browser that lead to the mess of pages that 'only work on IE'. Just because Firefox happens to be more adhe
Re:Browsers? (Score:5, Insightful)
IE, on the other hand, is a freaking nightmare. I find that IE7 works pretty well; in general I can fix its small bugs by changing the css in ways that don't break the standard or break rendering in other browsers, but IE6 is so horridly in compliant that even for a lot of really common css tasks that were around long before IE6 was released and that Microsoft helped to write are totally broken. Things like the
So, IE7 finally mostly works, but MS fucked the user interface up so bad that everybody wants to stick with IE6, which is still the world's most common browser over a year after IE7's release. Do you realize how bad that is? How many people haven't upgraded from Firefox 1.5 to Firefox 2?
I can only conclude that Microsoft does this kind of stuff on purpose. They have a standard for trident: their web development products always produce code that renders perfectly in all versions of IE. Rendering the w3c standard is not hard: a bunch of hobbyists and a small company in Norway have both separately proven that you can do it on relatively limited resources. The only reason they could possibly have for their horribly broken browser is that they have an interest in web standards being broken.
Ok. Rant over.
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Exactly. I'm registered at a pair of sites that send out surveys, and I get paid anywhere from $1 to $5 for each one I qualify for and complete. One of them sometimes sends out surveys that only work on IE. I don't even bother going to them because I hate having to open IE. (And what if I were on Linux, and didn't have it available? Would that mean my opinion didn't count?) I've mentioned this to the company's s
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Re:Browsers? (Score:5, Funny)
http://humor.beecy.net/geeks/web-design/web-design.gif [beecy.net]
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These are usually the ones that want both W3C compliance AND compatibility back to IE 5.0. Particularly if the designers then hand me stuff that can't be easily implemented without partial transparency.
IE is a fucking nightmare. Seriously. It has retarded the development of the web by several years at minimum.
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I know that it's popular to trash IE. We all do it, But its bugs are well documented and workarounds have been posted for the vast majority of them. It's a wonderful thought to want to build for browsers that have full version 2 CSS (and JavaScript) compliance, let's see that's, uh... Well someday a browser might support all of the existing recommendation. All browsers are deficient. IE is just more so.
Working with IE requires an attitude adjustment as much as technical
Don't Bother (Score:2)
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What I can not figure out is, why use a printed book to tediously look up a bug into, when a good IDE or editor does the same for you automatically.
TopStyle or Dreamweaver will not just assist and autocomplete CSS properties for you, they'll check your HTML/CSS code on the fly against a list of selected browsers
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No, they're not huge amazing apps or pages.
Yes, they are important - things like SAP reports, system uptime reports, graphs, charts, metrics of all types. Stuff like that - mainly backoffice pages that I use to make management happy by giving them the data they want in easy ways.
So, for me, a pocket guide that I can toss next to my laptop for a few days wh
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I own a copy of this pocket guide (and they're not kidding, it fits in a pocket). It gives you a listing of what browsers fully supports what, what is outright broken, and what behaves strangely and how so- and if possible, how to fix it, for Opera, Safari, IE, Firefox, etc, and for specific versions of said browsers. It's absolutely indispensable.
Yes, you can look all of these things up online, but rarely are they in one place and neatly organized.
I liked this guide (Score:5, Funny)
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I'd *like* to use pure CSS layouts, but at the end of the day tables work; consistently and quickly.
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Why would you need to? They just WORK. *sigh*
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IE speaks a completely different CSS language than Firefox, they just happend to sound about 95% alike.
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IE speaks a completely different CSS language than Firefox, they just happened to sound about 95% alike.
If as much as 5% of your code is viewed differently between the two browsers, you're up for some serious headaches. Whenever I'm writing CSS, I always end up with problems that usually shouldn't exist. And it's not so much that there's a difference between IE and FF in terms of how they interpret the code, but how poorly IE copes with it. When something's not working like you'd expect it to, it usually ends with some ugly workarounds or a largely rewritten portion of the code.
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I'm not saying the 5% isn't going to produce a big difference, but that 5% also isn't an all-encompasing end of the world either.
Programmer's Reference (Score:1)
Godsend (Score:2, Insightful)
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Heretic! Burn him! W3C is the holy trinity of W's - all of their specifications are godsends by definition.
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Maybe so, but I suspect the god that sent them was Cthulu.
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A good, free reference (Score:5, Informative)
Helped me through many a "what's that called again?" session.
Link updated because both original links were dead.
Re:A good, free reference (even more!) (Score:2)
That one is my favorite too (though I used to use a cssv1 version [digilife.be] that is very similar and the sources are obviously similar.
I also really like the diagram in this one but don't like how the rest of it is organized. Which is too bad because anyone that owns a domain name of ilovejackdaniels.com deserves more positive praise. [ilovejackdaniels.com]
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For a complete selection of quick and dirty guides to common technologies IloveJackDaniels.com is a very handy resource, thanks Dave. [ilovejackdaniels.com]
Am I missing something? (Score:4, Funny)
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They accidentally put their maths into quirks mode.
Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
wow (Score:5, Funny)
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this is especially useful for unconventional web developers who don't actually have access to the internet.
I agree with you in some ways, but there are still many cases where a well-written book with all the important information in one place beats wading through a bunch of websites.
When I was at university (five or so years back), I was pretty surprised that the library was still so useful. You'd have thought that the Internet would have taken away a lot of its utility, but although the net was great for filling the inevitable gaps, it was also quite patchy, and I wasted a *very* high proportion of my time s
It might also be nice .... (Score:2)
Alone At Sea... (Score:4, Interesting)
Before I go further, I use CSS everyday I design, especially since I'm still learning all of it's annoying idiosyncrasies, mainly because (and I'm not the only one) the CSS language itself is flawed (constraints & variables being some of which CSS lacks). The idea of what CSS created for, style sheets, is great & is a step forward, but the way we have to use style sheets with CSS sometimes makes me wonder what an abortion feels like.
I admit, some days it seems to get *easier* to deal with since I actively remember the times I more or less lost my shit because the stupid code wouldn't render correctly in different browsers, so I also remember (most of the time) what to avoid, but I really don't think the full potential of style sheets will be fufilled with CSS as the way it is. Even with CSS 3 (I'm not touching HTML5; I'm one of those "wacky" people who think we should stick with what we have until it's stable enough to warrant additions; a more eloquent way of putting it has already been said: http://www.molly.com/2007/06/14/defy-the-pedantic-semantic-html5-and-xhtml-11-must-stop-for-now/ [molly.com] ), I just don't see the difficulties of CSS, which warrant most of the CSS books being made, being resolved anytime soon.
I know I'm not the only one who begrudgingly uses CSS (I realize they are other technologies to use instead or to supplement CSS' shortcomings, I'm currently looking into that...), and I know I'm not the only who thinks something new should be made to address what CSS fails to do. I'm not talking about HTML5, nor CSS3, and defintley not FLASH (although, personally, I think if HTML & CSS were to somehow utilize a plug-in for browsers to render shit properly, standards would be able to compete with FLASH, but I'm just rambling there).
While googling out of frustration, I came across this:
PSL (Proteus Style Sheets): http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~multimedia/papers/jucs/jucs.html [uwm.edu]
Why Current Style Sheet Standards Have Failed to Improve Document Engineering: http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~multimedia/WWW8/webEng.html [uwm.edu]
I know every single Pure-CSS zealot is going to moan & groan at me for thinking differently than them, but honestly, PSL seems like a way better idea than simply adding on to an inheritantly broken style sheet language in which books & books need to be made to tell people what hoops to jump through to get it work. I don't know, I guess that sounds stupid to too many people; often I've let that prevent me from expressing my not unreasonable doubts.
Sometimes I feel like some poor bloke who time traveled back to the Titanic but can't prevent anything due to paradox. :\
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OK, here's a shot at it:
Hey it's Ruby! gee, that wasn't too hard.
My example is intended to show inheritance and object attributes (which is pretty much all CSS is). You do
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Ruby is actually one of the languages I've been trying to learn in hopes of eventually being able to take the grunt work out of HTML / CSS via HAML & SASS. Admittedly, I haven't gotten out of the "Learn To Program" book (Chris Pine; Facet of Ruby Series), mainly because of the daily grind, but dammit I wish we could write CSS the way you just did. The fact that you can use Ruby and/or other programming languages (Clever CSS, via python, looked interesting, but is probably a little beyond my novice lev
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I'm glad I'm not the only one. CSS is OK as a replacement for the FONT tag, but beyond that it is a complete mess that fails to do what it says on the tin - since the HTML inevitably has to be modified to achieve any significant layout change (pick up a CSS cookbook and look at the examples - they're as much about where
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Indeed, as of late, I'm finding the usual "not all browsers implement correctly", while a sympathetic & mostly true argument, tiresome and seemingly an excuse for CSS' being so difficult to work with. It wouldn't surprise me if, hypothetically, if IE were banished, and every user upgraded to either Opera, Firefox, Safari and or Swift (Swift is a new webkit browser being made to replace the just awful Safari release for windows, google it...), there would still be massive difficulties with CSS.
Of cour
Yay... (Score:1)
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True, rounded anything is hard to achieve with the current CSS support we have in browsers. However, a lot of that is addressed with CSS3. Check out http://virtuelvis.com/download/218/border-radius.html [virtuelvis.com] to see a preview of some of the border-radius properties - most of which don't work in many browsers.
For now, I try to add any non-semantic HTML with Javascript, at least to keep it out of the way. It's a pretty ugly way to do things, but it's what we have to work with currently.
Where's the beef? (Score:2)
The back cover claims there is "a chart displaying detailed information about CSS support for every style element and its cross-browser compatibility."
I saw no chart in the book.
Maybe they tried to do the chart without tables and gave up..
How does this differ from the 2nd edition? (Score:1)
Oops, spotted a typo (Score:2)
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I had the same thought about the 'colspan' attribute, but after some quick Google'd research, I discovered why they made those particular attributes required.
Since CSS is supposed to be strictly presentational, those kinds of details need to be designated in the HTML. Colspan has to deal with the structure of a table, and the number of rows has to deal with the structure of the textarea.
Whether that's appropriate or not for textareas is beyond me, but the colspan thing made sense. Just wanted to shed some
A Pocket Reference!!!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Someone please translate this into something that resembles logic, please?
ul.nav,.nav, ul{
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
cursor: default;
list-style-type: none;
border: 0px solid #369;
display: table ;
}
ul.nav>li{
display: table-cell;
position: relative;
padding: 2px 6px;
}
ul.nav li>ul{
display: none;
position: absolute;
max-width: 40ex;
margin-left: -6px;
margin-top: 2px;
}
ul.nav li:hover>ul{
display : block;
}
display: block;
padding: 2px 10px;
}
ul.nav,
background-color: white;
color: blue;
}
ul.nav li:hover,
background-color: yellow;
color: blue;
}
ul.nav li:active,
background-color: black;
color: white;
}
text-decoration: none;
}
CSS is a miserable and irrational set of style tags that when used to do things like turn un-ordered lists in menu's becomes pretty much inscrutable and damn near unusable. Nested DIVS are a poor substitute for nested tables. If you want to say I am wrong, then show me how create that will hold data in perfect rows and columns, or how you can make two divs equally occupy 50% of the outer div's area.
Re:A Pocket Reference!!!!!! (Score:4, Informative)
1) It relies on all kinds of things which IE either doesn't support or supports badly, including: the child selector (that's the > bits), using the
2) The code has needless redundancy built into it. Example: in that first rule set, they're using three selectors:
Stacking selectors by separating them using a comma can be useful, but this has been done badly. The first selector alone should have been sufficient for their purposes, or the second one alone. And the third one is simply atrocious, because it makes the rule apply to EVERY unordered list in the document unless it is explicitly overridden. If there is EVER an unordered list in the document which is NOT part of the menu, it's going to be totally fubared by the menu formatting instructions. Selectors which apply to every element in the entire document are dangerous that way unless you use them really carefully or make only tiny modifications. For example, I like changing the cursor over label elements so that people will know they do something if you click them, like this:
The modification is very simple, does not change the basic appearance or functionality of the element, and provides a useful bit of feedback to the user.
3) Inconsistent use of whitespace. Note that sometimes a rule will start immediately after another with no whitespace, like this:
The rule set for ".nav a" starts on the same line as the previous rule set finishes, which is ugly as sin. For improved comprehensibility, it should have at least two carriage returns after the previous rule set. And the author didn't even do it consistently.
I'll happily agree that this is an ugly bit of code. And no, the CSS pocket reference will not be especially helpful in untangling this snarl; it's a reference, for looking up properties and selectors. It shows you what individual bits do, but does not explain how the many bits may be combined. References are primarily useful when you're building your own code, and rather less so when interpreting somebody else's.
That said, I have to take issue with your conclusions.
1) "CSS is a miserable and irrational set of style tags"
First off, CSS doesn't use tags. It uses selectors to refer to tags. Second, CSS itself is not irrational. It is abstract, and takes a while to wrap your head around. It has some inadequacies and shortcomings, such as making multiple columns have an equal height or centering content vertically as well as horizontally, both of which are a serious pain in the ass. But you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. CSS also gives you quite a lot of fairly fine-grained control over your pages. Moving the presentational stuff out of your HTML makes it considerably easier to read (assuming that you don't keep throwing extraneous DIVs into it instead of learning the inheritance rules and the box model), and has truly amazing benefits
Pocket Reference? (Score:2)
No interest in a reference that isn't searchable. (Score:2)
People STILL unclear of the concept. (Score:1)
Is this modern version of the legendary IBM 'green card' [planetmvs.com] written as text or is it in trendy hypertext? [wikipedia.org]
The latter would be preferable, especially if I'm on a PC and coding my HTML and CSS, etc... Of course, if it's hypertext, I'll hafta take it out of my shirt pocket to run the mouse across it, otherwise I might get unsightly mouse stains on my shirt.
But, all-in-all, sounds like a very useful product!
I bought this book a while back (Score:1)