Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation

Aimed at Web professionals with HTML experience, discusses concepts including cascade and inheritance, rules and selectors, typography, and boxes.

Suitable for Web designers and developers alike, Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation provides an extremely approachable guide to some of the latest thinking on cascading style sheets for separating out content from presentation. Filled with useful advice on coping with the real difficulties of using CSS in the real world, this book fills a valuable niche with its compact format and savvy advice from the field.

The practical perspective on today's CSS and XHTML standards, as well as an excellent eye for Web design, helps to distinguish this text. After a tour of the evolution of today's Web standards, from HTML to XHTML to CSS used to format underlying content, the authors provide plenty of actual pages using style sheets. They work slowly to build a basic set of terms and techniques with style sheets. There's good coverage of all the options here, like inline and external CSS and most everything in between.

We liked the book's coverage of font and type from a design perspective, before digging in to using CSS to format text. (This approach helps show what you should aim for when you present Web pages built with CSS.) Extensive samples of a variety of Web page styles using multicolumn formats will get you started on your own Web pages, regardless of your site's requirements.

The book closes with several standout sections on coping with the admitted difficulties of getting CSS to work correctly on all of today's major browsers (including Netscape and Internet Explorer). The authors provide specific suggestions for overcoming known incompatibilities, as well as suggesting general techniques for troubleshooting and testing your site across different browsers. Final samples show off CSS and XHTML used for three case studies: a photo gallery, a personal log, and an online store.

With its practical suggestions for using CSS in real projects and a generally approachable style, this book offers a truly winning combination. It's perfect for anyone who wants to get a better knowledge of CSS used to build Web pages that will look good across a range of today's browsers. --Richard Dragan