Everything You Know About Css Is Wrong!

by Rachel Andrew, Kevin Yank

Get ready to experience an eye-opening expos on CSS as you know it today. You'll discover a fresh approach to coding Cascading Style Sheets, making old hacks and workarounds a distant memory. In this book, you'll learn how to start taking full advantage of Internet Explorer 8 using the very latest CSS techniques -- whilst still catering for those nasty old browsers. You'll unearth what's put the final nail in the HTML table-based layout coffin, and gain an understanding from two experts why CSS has a very bright future. Some of the valuable insights in this book CSS was conceived in an age when web site design was simple; its creators never anticipated the level of intricacy required in the designs that it would be asked to deliver today. Clever designers figured out ways to make CSS do what they needed, but using techniques so convoluted that 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!

Genres: Web, Reference, Nonfiction, Computers, Programming

132 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2008

About the author

Rachel Andrew is a British web developer, author and speaker. She is an Invited Expert to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) CSS Working Group, Google Developer Expert, and a former member of the Web Standards Project. She is the editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine.

Reviews

[Ahmad Alfy · Rating 5 out of 5]

That's an awesome book that would definitely make me change the way I lay out sites! With the display:table property new potentials are opened. No more hacks, weird solutions, bugs ... It's the way we should adopt and we must push the community toward these techniques. This is huge for CSS like when people moved from HTML Tables to CSS

[Krishna Kumar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have seldom seen a more deceptive title. The authors take one aspect of CSS, creating a grid design, and show how it can be done better using the latest CSS techniques. They have done this well, but it hardly warrants the bombastic title because they don’t cover “everything” you know about CSS.

I am a little surprised that this book needed to be published. It is a short book (116 pages) on a very narrow topic and could have been better served by publishing it as a series of blog posts. The author explain the topic well and provide code and screenshots, but the book format is so limited. The other problem is that the new CSS technique will not work with older browsers and hence it does serve more follow-up on browser compatibility and special cases.

The publishers should have chosen a more specific title, say “Next Generation CSS Table Layouts” which sounds attractive enough and more meaningful. They should have asked the authors to provide more content, say 200 pages worth to discuss backward compatibility and other nuances.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brief but informative look at CSS display:table properties as it applies to layout. In a nutshell: the techniques are great, allowing you to implement some things that were easy to do with table-based layouts. The downside: although there's been support for these properties in the A-level browsers for a while, IE 6/7 don't support them.

In the end, you use the new techniques for 'good' browsers and supply backups for IE6/7. Meh.

The book ends with a short round-up of CSS positioning modules now being worked on by various W3C working groups.

Good stuff, but it's value is slightly limited.

[Alessandro Pellizzari · Rating 2 out of 5]

Troppo focalizzato su una singola caratteristica dei CSS. Contando anche il prezzo (30 dollari) e il numero di pagine, mi sentirei di sconsigliare caldamente l'acquisto. Fortunatamente l'ho comprato approfittando delle offerte natalizie.

Tutto il libro copre un argomento che sarebbe stato coperto tranquillamente da un post in 3 o 4 puntate su un blog, e il titolo, per quanto accattivante, è totalmente fuorviante, in quanto tratta solo della differenza tra layout tramite float e position e layout tramite attributi table, table-cell e table-row.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Actually, everything you know about CSS might be alright. The title is deceptive. And so is the dated content. The author brings forward a grid design. Quite lame and dated even for the publishing date. And the author spends the rest of the book giving you a step by step tutorial on how to do that. Nothing more. Nothing less. With some wasted pages on the problems with Internet Explorer. A useless and uncreative book about using CSS.

[Raena]

Well, I work for SitePoint, so you should feel free to take what I think with a grain of salt. But I do think it's a great way to explain these new techniques and I think it makes the whole idea of CSS3 layout options much less scary

[Kealii Ballao · Rating 5 out of 5]

Its more like a propaganda book. CSS-Tables. combining the worst and the best of the web to make something that, I guess is logical.

[Guilherme · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good primer on CSS tables and what it can do for CSS layouts. Very easy and short read, but worth it.

[Ben Rand]

fortunately, i don't know all that much about css. very focused, short book. ok, so i'm late to the party (the book's 3 years old). worth the read while on a car trip with nothing else to do.