Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design
Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design is not just a book on CSS for professionals – intermediate to advanced designers and developers but far more than that. Irrespective of the Professional tag there in the title, this book would still be useful for beginners and can in fact upgrade them to another level.
The nice part of this book was that I could refer to the screenshot diagrams alongside the codes. The emphasis laid out on the Separation Of Content and Design through techniques that are semantic, well-structured markups proved to be effective yet simple, clear-cut and to-the-point. Accessibility too, is taken care of.
Chapter 1 deals with planning and explains the steps to be taken while developing a website, how to wire up the structures and hierarchy effectively. It details on how to have a management scheme for any website development.
Chapter 2 effectively drives home the aspects of writing valid XHTML and CSS. Starting from the very basic CSS, the author has used detailed methodology on explaining selectors, inheritance, multiple declaration, shorthand CSS and how, when to use them effectively. A clear and conscise explanation in this chapter includes that of the modern day CSS-Cult, Table Less Layouts Using CSS and also clear reasoning behind Why To Drop The Tables From The Design, all the best practices for XHTML and CSS.
It won’t be surprising to call it a norm to use Javascript for drop down menus, navigation rollovers though many web standard gurus are treating them as passe. To my understanding, it will be more effective to follow these web standard gurus as it would prove profitable in the long run.
Chapter 3 cleared my confusion over boxes, specially flexible width boxes and custom corners. This chapter also goes into explaining how to create RollOver Menus using List Items, complete with design improvements and how to tackle some of the browser-compatibility issues. The study of blogger.com redesign was set as the backdrop for this section.
Chapter 4 talks about the much acclaimed site, PGA Championship and this chapter makes you feel easy on how to create those cool nifty drop-down menus with CSS rather than using JavaScript.
Chapter 5 takes up University of Florida as an example and explains a good navigation system and gives an insight into the Flash Satay, including Flash Satay with Server Side Detection. Chapter 6 highlights ESPN.com and how to use HTML Elements properly. On a personal note, I would suggest a very competitive alternative to embedded Flash SWFs in a Web Standard manner, deconcept’s FlashObject.
Many web gurus believe that flexible or liquid layout is a better choice as it has the content area that expands and contracts according to the browser window size.
Chapter 7, goes deep into 3-column layout using FastCompany.com website as the example. This chapter explains the fundamentals of CSS positioning and when to use which positioning. Keeping the doctrine of proper CSS positioning, a developer would be able to create a well formed flexible 3-column layout effortlessly.
The chapter finalizes with an idea about CSS switching using Javascript and server side script. Finally, the book brings together of all the previous chapters through Christopher Schmitt’s site and explains the steps to follow before creating the website as well as how to create the site more effectively.
Comments
Comments are closed.