CSS Mastering Advanced Web Standards Solutions

Sunday, December 26, 2010 by: Pawan Kumar Goyal

The authors of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions have put together a book that teaches how CSS works and how to that applies to the modern web browsers in and easy-to-follow format. The book is broken into sections covering various areas of page layout as well as tips on how to work around different browser's implementations of CSS. The book also includes case studies that take readers though designing complete web site layouts as well as a solid foundation in the often-forgotten basics of CSS.

The first chapter covers how CSS works. This includes how cascading affects how rules are interpreted, the !important keyword, as well as some tips on how to organize, compress and style sheets as well as mentioning how Apache's gzip compression can help out. There is a lot of basics here that, yes, might require reading more than once to understand, but are really important to understand how to write good, compact CSS code. The section on selectors is probably also helpful if you find yourself using the jQuery library later- the way it selects markup to operate on is the same.

Chapter two covers the box model, Internet Explorer's unique interpretation of it, positioning, clearing add other bits on how elements are displayed on the page. What readers won't find in this book is any coverage of CSS3 or HTML5- and that's maybe just as well. Today it seems like while pretty much everything that isn't Internet Explorer is supporting these emerging standards in some fashion. However, for now coders using CSS3 are finding they have to repeat almost the same code three times with browser-specific prefix before each CSS3 attribute, plus the proposed "official" syntax and there's the too-familiar grey area between what different browser engines say they support and how they implement them.

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