Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web
by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos
© 1997 Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley (278 pages)
ISBN 0-201-41998-X
$29.95 USA/ $23.96 Amazon.com
"Read this book if you want to really understand CSS and learn how to design effective style sheets. They [the authors] are the authorities on the subject; they co-wrote the CSS specification for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)."
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@ the reviewer |
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Pawan Vora is a Human Factors Engineer at |
Designing Web pages and Web sites became difficult when HyperText Markup Language (HTML) morphed from a logical, structural markup language to a combination of structural and presentation markup language. And I won't even mention all the problems caused by differences among browsers and platforms!
Help is now here in the form of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which allows separation of content and presentation. The ensuing benefits are improved presentation and page layout, reusability of presentation templates (style sheets) across Web pages, easier maintenance and changes to the Web site look-and-feel, and faster download. However, knowing how to write CSS does not guarantee effective use of CSS - as knowing tools like Adobe Photoshop does not make one a good graphic designer.
To really understand CSS and learn how to design effective style sheets, I'd recommend Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web, written by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos. They are the authorities on the subject; they co-wrote the CSS specification for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The book doesn't assume background in HTML (though it'd help!) and starts out with some fundamentals of HTML. In Chapter 2, Enter CSS, the authors introduce the concept of CSS and describe its benefits. The real power of CSS is then described in chapters 3-8: Selectors, Fonts, Basic structures, Space, images, and Colors. Each chapter focuses on specific HTML elements and shows how CSS allows one to influence their appearance. These chapters not only describe how CSS can be implemented, but also suggest several design guidelines for its effective use.
In Chapter 9, CSS Arts and Crafts, the authors show the effects others have achieved using CSS. But, let me warn you: "Don't try this at home." These pages are meant for demonstration, and may lead to unusable Web sites as they don't degrade gracefully on non-CSS browsers. Chapters 10-13 are a must read if you want to start using CSS at your Web site. In these chapters, the authors present case studies on how to convert current HTML-based designs into CSS-based designs and to show how switching to CSS could result in more compact documents. They also explain how the CSS rules are interpreted and conflicts are resolved and how CSS can be used effectively for a large collection of Web pages. In Chapter 14, the authors describe alternative approaches to control presentation of electronic documents such as SGML and PDF.
If you are not impressed by the capabilities of what CSS can do as described in this book, you should read Chapter 15, Looking Ahead. Here, the authors describe what we can expect from the future versions of CSS. Quite a few of the proposed features are included in the Working Draft of Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (CSS2) such as absolute positioning, aural style sheets, tables, and special effects (e.g., text-shadow property). For more information on CSS, refer to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web site.
This book is written in an authoritative manner, with the conciseness and clarity I like. This should be expected from the people who actually wrote the CSS specifications. However, the writing at times may appear a little dry and written like a technical specification rather than a gentle introduction to the topic area.
Despite being such an excellent resource on Cascading Style Sheets, this book has a few shortcomings. First, the claim made on the book cover that CSS is supported in Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape Navigator (NN) is a little misleading. Yes, the 4.0 versions of the browsers support CSS; but, their implementations are slightly different. See http://style.webreview.com/ for more details on CSS compatibility. Furthermore, IE 3.0 has only a limited support for CSS and NN 3.x doesn't support CSS at all. Second, a majority of the examples given in the book are fairly simple. The authors have not offered the complex implementations of CSS. More complex examples in the last few chapters would have helped! But I am sure that we will see more books entitled Designing (cool, killer dynamic, amazing, awesome, or whatever design related adjectives you prefer!) Web Sites With CSS :-)
To summarize, this book is an excellent introduction to Style Sheets. However, if you are looking for a quick-and-dirty (and, I mean that!) way to learn Cascading Style Sheets, this book is not for you. This book is meant to get a better and deeper understanding on the subject area. And I'd suggest you do so, because although CSS is here, its wide-spread use is at least 6-8 months away... so, why not take advantage of the possibility of riding the CSS wave. If you are unsure, you may want to check out the Web site set up by the authors to keep readers updated on the subjects discussed in the book. Sample chapters and the table of contents are available at this site.
Once you start reading the book, you may want to use CSS on your Web pages. But, don't be disheartened by the fact that not all browsers support it and its implementation is not consistent across browsers and platforms. Take your existing Web pages that you know work well without CSS. Now, start enhancing it using CSS. And, make sure you use a linked style sheet (you'll know how to do this when you read the book). If a browser doesn't understand CSS, your CSS enhancements will be ignored and the Web page will appear as you had originally designed. And, the browsers that understand CSS will now show the pages with CSS enhancements!
Welcome to the new world of Web design!
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Last update: June 1, 1998
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