Cederholm Dan - CSS Cookbook

Every book tells a storyeven books on web design tips and techniques.

This book is about Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS as its commonly abbreviated. CSS is a simple standardized syntax that gives designers extensive control over the presentation of their web pages and is an essential component of web design today.

Compared to 1990s-era development techniques, CSS gives web designers greater control over their designs so that they can spend less time editing and maintaining their websites. CSS also extends beyond traditional web design to designing and controlling the look of a web page when it is printed.

You dont need any special hardware or software to design web pages. The basic requirements are a computer, a modern browser such as Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer for Windows (to name a few), and your favorite web page editor. A web page editor can be anything from a simple text editor such as Notepad (for Windows) or TextEdit (for the Mac), to a full-fledged WYSIWYG tool such as Adobe Dreamweaver set in code view.

Now you know what the book is about. Let me tell you its story, its history.

Some would say web design officially began when Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, put together the first set of web pages. Others would say it began when the center tag came about due to Netscapes own extension of HTML.

Though it might seem ironic, I happen to believe that this new media really got started with books. The books that helped lead the way to the dot-com boom in the 1990s started with Lynda Weinmans first full-color book about web graphics, Designing Web Graphics (Pearson), which was published in January 1996, and then David Siegels Creating Killer Web Sites (Hayden), published several months later that same year. These two books helped to kick off the web revolution as much as those who invented the technologies that made the Web possible.

However, the methods written in those books, although cutting edge for their time, are out of date in todays context. As I write these pages, it has been 13 years since those initial books were published; the same year Weinmans and Siegels first books about web design came out describing how to use font tags, nested tables, and single-pixel GIFs was the same year CSS was first introduced.

CSS has come a long way since then. With more than 13 years of development put into it, its only nowwith the advent of Internet Explorer 8 for Windows reaching a large audiencethat web designers, developers, and everyday users of browsers can use CSS2 to its intended potential.

In addition to IE8, other browsers are making their presence known, and are often ahead of Internet Explorer in supporting new features. Browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera are implementing the latest specifications of CSS3 and HTML5 as quickly as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Working Groups members are bandying them about.

If you are serious about building todays usable and cutting-edge websites, use CSS and CSS Cookbook , a collection of CSS-based solutions to common web design problems. Together they can help you create your own bit of web design history.