Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong

Reviewed by Robert L Pritchett

Authors: Rachel Andres and Kevin Yank

http://www.sitepoint.com/books/csswrong1/

Released: October 2008

Pages: 130

$30 USD

ISBN: 978-0-9804552-2-9

It's a book aimed squarely at web designers and developers who want to ensure they’re up-to-date with the very latest, best-practice CSS techniques.

Requirements: Knowledge of CSS in a PC environment.

Strengths: Looks as the next generation of CSS code.

Weaknesses: While mainly focused on the next Microsoft Explorer 8 browser release, there is some cross-platformable knowledge here. The title of the book is a misnomer.

Introduction

Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong! is an eye-opening exposé on CSS as we know it today. You’ll discover a fresh approach to coding Cascading Style Sheets where old hacks and workarounds are just a distant memory.

You’ll learn how to start taking full advantage of the very latest CSS techniques while still catering for older browsers and discover what’s put the final nail in the HTML table-based layout coffin.

CSS was conceived in an age when web-site design was simple; its creators never anticipated the intricacy of designs that it would be asked to deliver today.

Clever designers figured out ways to make CSS do what they needed, but by using techniques so convoluted it became unpredictable and difficult to master. CSS just became too hard...

The good news is, that’s all about to change, and this book will show you how!

What I Learned

I may never have to program specifically for MS Explorer again (I never did). CSS has matured to the point that most recent browsers now play nice with it.

Whole the book relishes in the knowledge that HTML table-based layouts are essentially old-school, the book goes into how best to do tables, but this time from CSS and into how CSS3 can do a better job of layout control.

What the book does do is a fairly good job of how to deal with various browsers with work-arounds. The graphics are surrounded with lots of white space.

Conclusions

I found the book to be "light" reading.

Book summary – CSS will work with MS Explorer 8 now. You still have to program for older browsers, depending on who you want to reach as your audience. The book may be "forward-looking", but how many folks are going to use MS Explorer 8 anyway? CSS has its place, but it is "no place" in older versions of MS Explorer.