Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong! | Rachel Andrew, Kevin Yank

Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong! | Rachel Andrew, Kevin Yank | Wait a few years before buying this book. Code is not suppored by IE 6 and 7 browsers

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Everything You Kno...

	Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong! Rachel Andrew, Kevin Yank SitePoint, 2008 - 116 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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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 include:

how you can take full advantage of IE8 how to take CSS tables to the limit and beyond letting you say goodbye to old hacks and workarounds FOREVER! help you rediscover what you first loved about CSS ensure make the most of what CSS has to offer understand the road ahead for CSS

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!

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Provocative Title - Covers IE8 With Eye Towards Backwards Compatability

A provocative title to be sure, but after reading a sample chapter on another website, I placed my order.

The book focuses on the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8, which thanks to the auto-update in Windows will be quickly adopted. IE8 offers vastly superior CSS support, and makes many of the workarounds and hacks obsolete.

Thankfully, the authors haven't completely disregarded older browsers, and chapter 4 focuses on backward compatability with IE6 and IE7 so that you can adopt the new techniques this year.

I should mention - this is a short book. If you're expecting a 500+ pager that'll take you a month to read elsewhere, look elsewhere. If you're after a tutorial on CSS, then I recommend "HTML Utopia, 2nd Edition" or "CSS Antholgoy" by Rachel Andrew (who also co-wrote this book).

What you get though is a concise summary on working with CSS layouts and the information that you'll need to stay up to date and keep your knowledge fresh and relevant.

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Wait a few years before buying this book. Code is not suppored by IE 6 and 7 browsers

This book provides an excellent tutorial on how to use the css table class, part of the CSS 2.1 specification, to create page layouts. And the book makes it look easy, showing you how to use CSS tables with colspan and rowspan. To veteran web developers, it brings back memories of HTML table layouts, which are still used by less experienced designers.

However before you get too excited, you need to be aware that the css table class demonstrated throughout this book is not supported by Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 and 7 browsers. Depending which survey you read, as of October 2008, IE 6 and IE 7 browsers are used by at least 80 percent of all Internet users. At this time, the css tables class is only supported by the Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers.

The authors talk about using css tables with the beta version of IE 8, but do not mention that IE 6 and 7 browsers do not support css tables until after several chapters. To their credit, they provide several suggestions for working with the Microsoft browsers, like setting up two different style sheets with one specifically with the older CSS specification to handle Microsoft browsers.

Most professional web developers cannot use the css table class right now. Imagine telling a client that their new site can only be seen by 20 of their potential audience.

Looking back on the history of browsers with poor CSS support, like Netscape 4.7 and IE 6, it takes years for old browsers to go away.

This book was published well before its time. I'll still give it four stars because it is well researched and written. You can buy it now and read about the future of web page layout or you can wait a few years, when IE 8 becomes popular, and put it to use.

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OK, but only worth the amazon price

I received notification from SitePoint about this book. They wanted almost $30 for it. I found it at amazon for substantially less, and ordered it.

There isn't much to the book, mostly a discussion of the new table handling in CSS. Informative, but not worth $30. And the title is definitely misleading, if not downright false. You need not "unlearn" everything you know about CSS, only learn new techniques for page layout using CSS tables instead of HTML tables.

I really didn't know what to expect from this slim volume (111 pages). I read it in one sitting, and filed it on my bookshelf with the other "need not revisit" tomes.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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