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
The chapters
1 - Understanding Structured Markup
Diving into the book, the first thing that surprised me was the first chapter, "Understanding Structured Markup" which poses the question "What are web standards?" This seems odd to me; regular readers of DMXzone will know that I'm a standards-freak and accessibility evangelist, but I can imagine a designer thinking to herself "What are web standards? Who cares; I just wanna do cool stuff like the Zen Garden".
It's certainly true that an understanding of how to structure a document semantically - how to make sure that the 'logical' divisions are in the (x)html - allows easier styling with CSS, and Molly describes this very well, but this chapter is no easy introduction; by page 16, we're briefly looking at theĀ notoriously complex syntax of document type definitions. My advice to the reader who finds this chapter off-putting on the first read would be to skip over it, read the rest of the book and then return to this chapter. It's vital information, which takes no prisoners yet manages the simplest, least scary explanation of xhtml syntax I've seen.
I was also delighted that Molly emphasizes that receiving warnings from the W3C validator does not mean a document is invalid, and wish I'd read this thoroughly 2 weeks ago when I was chasing a few warnings in a site I was making!
Chapter 2 - Learning CSS Theory
The opening of this chapter didn't hit the sweet spot for me; the list of reasons why CSS is super-duper seemed superfluous to me; if you buy the book, presumably you're already pretty convinced that you want to use the technology that it's covering. My main gripe with the chapter was the line "While this book isn't concerned with the User Agent styles, it's important to be aware of them". Grrrr! If it's important for a designer to be aware of them, at least a paragraph on what they are, and why they're important - and maybe a pointer to where I can look later, if it's too advanced a topic.
The chapter continues well, however - providing a good visual explanation of the order of precedence taken by the methods of styling style sheets to your structural mark-up, and those concepts that always used to trip me up before reading the book: the cascade, specificity, inheritance, child and adjacent selectors. It finishes with an overview of that aspect of CSS that most often has designers throwing their computers out of the window, sucking their thumbs and clutching teddy bears, due to buggy browsers - the box model.
Chapter 3 - Writing CSS
I loved this chapter. It is details Molly's simple but extremely powerful methodology for applying CSS to pages - and certainly saved my back when I made my first fully CSS/ XHTML site a couple of weeks ago. Having tied myself up in knots - even with the very simple site I was trying to make - I used this chapter, which goes through the structured but unstyled page in small, logical steps, and (hallelujah!) my site was made. To those adept in CSS, the chapter might seem like ABC - but to me it helped me see the light. It also made me realize why Molly had kicked off the book with a discussion on structured (X)HTML; it is much more difficult to apply CSS to markup that is not semantic.
Chapter 4 - Typography, Chapter 5 - Color, Backgrounds and Borders
You can practically hear Molly rubbing her hands, sharpening her pencil, unable to wait to get stuck into the meatiest part of her book. (Just like with a sea-shell, if you hold the book up to your ear in a quiet room, you can hear exactly those sounds). This will be the most exciting part of the book so far for most of the audience - the low-down on how to control typography and colour far more precisely than you can with presentational HTML. It also makes me want to jump on a plane with a kazoo and banjo and sing The Greatest Hits of Shania Twain outside Bill Gates' house until he gives up and promises to continue to develop Internet Explorer so that it adds support for CSS properties like font-stretch, background-attachment and empty-cells. I'm not bashing Microsoft - but it would be great if 90%+ of the web were able to use this property, so re-open development of IE, Bill. You have been warned!
Apart from making my mouth water for browser support for properties that are in the CSS specifications, but will probably never be supported, a faultless section from Molly.
Chapter 6 - Working with CSS layouts
Ha ha! It's taken a few pages to get here, but this is the main attraction. Molly visually takes you through the various options that make table layouts sooo last century. "Visually" is the watch-word here; so many CSS books use lots of words describing the visual difference between various properties when clear screenshots would save loads of time and confuse the reader less. There's a painless exploration of the box model hack (errm.. sorry, workaround) which I can thoroughly recommend.
My only negative on this chapter was that there could've been more, with greater depth paid to the concept of the flow, floats and relative positioning. As a newbie to this area of CSS (my sites are largely textual, so I need few layout tricks) I'm not sure I feel confident yet about Relative Positioning.
Patrick Woldberg
Working as a developer creating Dreamweaver extensions and designing/programming for the community sites.
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