The K&R of CSS
As a technical person, CSS for years has baffled me. Not simple things, like turning <h1> red. I mean real CSS for modest web sites that need to look good for clients.
I own two books on CSS: Dave Shea/Molly Holzschlag The Zen of CSS Design and Eric Meyer’s Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition.
Zen is a decent book oriented toward graphic designers for the web, and doesn’t purport to be a CSS reference. It shows what can be done to well structured html with full CSS treatment. Zen covers a contest for designers whereby a fixed set of input html was the operand for whatever CSS operator they could come up with. Stop by the book’s site and take a look at the number of ways to dress up basic markup with original CSS. Basically, skins for html.
Meyer’s book for some reason I just can’t learn from. I don’t know why. I’ve tried reading it three times since I bought it a couple years ago. I don’t know if it’s because the book starts off discussing issues that every time surprise me, or what. I use the CSS reference in the back of the book not infrequently, but the remainder of the text has become jinxed for me. It’s probably a perfectly good book for others, but it doesn’t work for me. Meyer’s book is published by Tim O’Reilly, no less, whose good reputation as publisher of technical books is second to none.
But I was struck by the intro chapter on CSS that I ran across while reading Ajax in Action. No, the CSS treatment is far from complete, but as a programmer it spoke to me. Succinctly and clearly.
What I’d like to see is a “CSS for Programmers”. Programmers primary line of work is not site layout or presentation, but they’re intimately involved in generating the horse on which those clothes will hang. And often, a programmer has to know some presentation CSS to make a site look passable, until a design person can be brought in to bring it home.
CSS for Programmers — the K&R of CSS: emphasizing presentation from an analytical point of view for people whose handwritten notes look like pseudocode.
Anyone know of such a book?
[tags]css,web design[/tags]
