Martine Dowden - Architecting CSS: The Programmer’s Guide to Effective Style Sheets

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484257494 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

As an international community, the W3C starts with a mission statement: Web for All, Web on Everything. This means the Web is a medium designed to adapt to the needs and preferences of every user, and the constraints of every device. But that poses a problem for design. To quote the very first website:

This implies no device-specific markup, or anything which requires control over fonts or colors, for example.

In the early days of the Internet, web design seemed impossible. How could we have planned for every possible combination of user-needs and device capabilities into the futurefrom text-only terminals to smart speakers, watches, HD displays, and accessibility devices?

Nearly 30 years later, CSS is the standard web language of design, used on nearly every website and application we develop. But that broad use, and the low barriers to getting started, can lead us to underestimate this powerful language and the complex problems it is designed to solve.

As the web continues to grow its more important than ever for professional developers to understand how and why CSS works, and how we can get the most out of it.

In this book, Martine and Michael bring their experience and teaching expertise to the topic leading us through every layer of the language: from cascade and inheritance, to progressive enhancement, web layout, responsive design, and architecture. This book is packed with guidance to keep your CSS resilient and organized.

Miriam Suzanne

Miriam Suzanneis a project manager, user-experience designer, and front-end architect. An accomplished writer and novelist, she authored Jump Start Sass and is a staff-writer for CSS Tricks (https://css-tricks.com/). Suzanne is a member of the Sass core team, and creator of popular open-source tools including Susy, True, and Herman. She is an Invited Expert with the W3C CSS Working Group and a teacher for the Mozilla Developer channel, producing resources for web professionals including tools, videos, articles, and demos. Suzanne is an international conference speaker and in 2017 she won the Best Of speaker award at CSS Dev Conference.

Writing a book is a project of passion and commitment and takes a tremendous amount of time and support from friends and family, doubly so when writing multiple books in a single year. We would like to thank our children, Brook and Xander, for their patience during this process. And of course their grandparents, Marc and Elisabeth Ebtinger, for making it possible for us to dedicate time to writing and conferences.

Without the support of the technology and speaking community, we would not be where we are today. Lee Brandt and Kevin Miller were instrumental in getting Martine to start speaking at conferences. Along with Lee, Jeff Strauss and Jon Mills helped us expand our conference presence and meet a large number of other generous people. Nate Taylor prompted Michael to start speaking about CSS. Michael first met Chris DeMars because of CSS and Chris later nominated us for the GDE, which was significantly helpful. And of course we must mention Philip Japikse, fellow speaker and Apress author, who has been tremendously supportive and without whom this book would not have happened.

Many of those who influenced us on CSS are already mentioned within the pages of this book, but its important to note the early and long-lasting influence that Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag have had on our understanding of CSS.

Finally, we must mention those who contributed directly to the pages youre about to read. The Apress team of Louise Corrigan, Nancy Chen, and Phil Nash has been supportive the whole way, from walking through the proposal process to ensuring the quality of the finished book. Our last thanks goes to the many people who went above and beyond to support our research on the history of accessibility and the people involved, including Sarah Bourne, Fred de Villamil, Jon Baggaley, Andy Budd, Eric Meyer, Steven Pemberton, Dylan Wilbanks, Chris Wilson, and Chris Lilley.