Book review: Molly E Holzschlag "CSS: The Designer's Edge"
An in-depth review of the only CSS book aimed at designers, Molly E Holzschlag's "CSS: The Designer's Edge"
You can find the book here at DMXzone
Title: Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer's Edge
Author: Molly Holzschlag, Foreword: Eric Meyer
Publisher: Sybex, 2003. ISBN: 07821-4184-6
Initial Impressions.
DMXzone contributor, Molly Holzschlag, sent me her latest book a few weeks ago, and I read it and liked it very much. The pages are glossy; it's full colour; there's plenty of white-space and the layout is well designed. You might think I'm being utterly superficial - but first impressions count. I believe that if the look and feel of a book aren't attractive and carefully done, it's unlikely that the content will be up to much. I suppose you could say I judge a book by its cover - in this case, I didn't; in fact, I find the front cover to be the least attractive aspect of the book. I don't know why, I didn't like it at all.
A small, but very welcome design feature was that the top of the left-hand page has the chapter title, while the top of the right-hand page has a few words on the content of this page. This makes it very easy to flick through the book after reading it to search for a section to refresh your memory.
Why does any of this matter? Some computer books look like school textbooks from the 1960s, and that's OK if they are designed for learning some hardcore technology like X-forms or Jakarta Struts, but for a book to gain the confidence of the intended audience of designers and teach them mark-up, it has to look good as well as function well. There's plenty of screenshots, easy to spot notes and tips, pointers to downloadable code and coloured sidebars which give it an easy-read magazine-like feel. To borrow a phrase from the folks at Macromedia, experience matters.
Who's the book for?
The promise of the book is encapsulated in the title; it's a book for designers who wish to use the power of CSS for their designs. Of course, CSS appeals to many because of its separation of structure and content which pleases the markup purists; accessibility evangelists appreciate the fact that it leaves structural markup suitable for screenreaders; site maintainers enjoy the fact that one change to the main CSS file can effect a look'n'feel change across all the pages in a site. All these are true of CSS, but the main emphasis of Molly's book is the control that designers can have over their page.
The author.
With more than twenty books on CSS gracing the virtual bookshelves of Amazon, an important consideration when investing your hard-earned dollars, pounds or Euros must be the author. The credentials behind this book are certainly impressive; as one of the Web Standards Project, and someone who teaches CSS and XHTML at conferences and seminars, Molly is certainly someone who knows the subject. That's why we invited her to write when we began our Premium Tutorial Service at DMXzone. The fact that the undisputed king of CSS, Eric Meyer, wrote the foreword and was the technical editor adds further credentials.
Something else that I always look for in a book is a narrative voice. Maybe it's because I come from a Literature Major background, but I believe that reading a book for learning rather than for pleasure doesn't necessarily mean indigestible stodgy lumps of information-gravy being spooned down my throat. I like to feel that the author knows what they're talking about, and isn't afraid to say what they mean.
This book is no hack-job. By that I mean, you immediately get the sense that Molly isn't writing this book because some publisher offered her some dollars. She passionately wants you to use CSS - her introduction throws down a gauntlet to the very audience that the book is aimed at:
"We have not yet learned to design the Web. It's going to be the people using CSS in the next few years who will come up with the innovative design ideas we need to help drive the potential of the web in general. It is my hope that this book will help you become one of those innovators, and I wait with enthusiasm to hear about the successes from those readers who use the techniques described here to design their sites."
This kind of passion can sometimes be a bad thing in a technical book. For a long time I was unconvinced by people who'd made great claims for CSS as I was yet to be convinced that CSS could produce designs as attractive as those made by tag soup and multi-nested tables. While the excellent final section of the book shows that CSS can replace tables perfectly well and be quicker and more standard, I don't think this book does demonstrate that CSS designs can be more appealing than prehistoric tabular designs. Not that it matters, because most of us in the Web community have had our eyes opened by the CSS-only designs at the CSS Zen Garden run by Dave Shea (who quotes Molly as the person who got him into the Web in his DMXzone interview).
Patrick Woldberg
Working as a developer creating Dreamweaver extensions and designing/programming for the community sites.
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