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
Chapter 7 - Reconstructing a Table-Based site
This chapter is based on conference talk by Molly and Eric Meyer on how to strip a site laid out in tables down to basics and build it back up with CSS. This, to me, was an extraordinary chapter showing the power of CSS and structured markup. I urge everyone to read this chapter, and - if you find yourself inheriting support for an old tabular site, please consider spending a day duplicating Molly's methodology to rework the presentation of the site. Next time you have to make a site-wide amendment to the styles in the site, you'll be glad you did - and you'll almost certainly save your user's download time and your client's bandwidth bills , as well as go a long way towards complying with section 508/ Disability Discrimination legislation.
Oops. I'm on my soapbox again. Sorry.
Chapter 8 - CSS Design Gallery, Chapter 9 - Wired News: A Visual Tour
These short chapters, while superfluous to learning CSS, are good pointers about where to look next for inspiration, or to assure yourself that CSS really is as powerful as Molly has convinced you it is, and that it's worth turning back to the start and reading the book again. Chapter 8 shows the cream of the crop as it was earlier this year, highlighting sites such as Eric Meyer's www.meyerweb.com, Doug Bowman's www.stopdesign.com and others. This chapter is somewhat obsolete now that the CSS Zen Garden is there to really showcase CSS, but that's the Web these days; everything is obsolescent.
Chapter 9 is very satisfactory, as it buries the belief that CSS is not really suitable for big heavily used sites. Wired.com is a hugely well-known site, with a different colour-scheme for each day of the week (e.g., same structure but different style - sound familiar?) and Molly gives us a whistle-stop tour though the main features of the redesigned site. How the conversion to fully accessible CSS was accomplished would be a book in itself, so I mean nothing insulting by calling it a whistle-stop tour.
Conclusion
Although Molly is a DMXzone premium author, I can't put my hand on my heart and tell you that this book is perfect. I would like to have had more on how to achieve CSS rollovers, like the Eric Meyer complex spirals, and more information on CSS positioning. Although Dreamweaver MX 2004 takes a lot of the complexity of CSS away from you, I still like to know what's going on. I admit, however, that I am a coder rather than a designer, so maybe I shouldn't criticize a book whose title tells me that I'm not in the primary readership group.
Overall, the book is very good, and fills an important niche. There's a lot of CSS books out there; many are nothing more than hack jobs written by journalists who don't use the technologies (a good tip for those buying computer books now that there will be loads of books on MX 2004: type the name of the author in Google and check out their own sites. Do they use the technologies they're charging you money to find out about?).
Other books are very worthy, and technically thorough, appealing to mark-up purists and are a bit.. well, yawn some. If you are looking for a book that fizzes with excitement, uses visuals to communicate visual concepts and is written by someone who knows her stuff, I recommend this book.
Molly Holzschlag has returned from the Seybold conference and resumes her CSS premium tutorials here on DMXzone on Tuesday 23rd September.
Here's a list of her current tutorials:
CSS Design: Creating a two-column layout
CSS Design with Dreamweaver MX: Creating a Weblog Layout
CSS Design with Dreamweaver MX: Positioning and CSS
Extensions
CSS Design with Dreamweaver MX: Borders, Backgrounds,
Blocks and Boxes
Better Living through Pleasantry: A Dreamweaver user's
guide to effective technical communication
Setting Dreamweaver Preferences for Forward Compatibility
HTML or XHTML: Which should I use?
Zen and the Art of Doctype switching
Patrick Woldberg
Working as a developer creating Dreamweaver extensions and designing/programming for the community sites.
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