CSS Cookbook

Preface

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple standardized system that gives designers extensive control over the presentation of their web pages. CSS is an essential component of web design today. Compared to 90’s-era workarounds, web builders have greater control over a web site’s design and spend less time editing and maintaining that design. CSS also extends beyond the traditional web design to design and control the look of a web page when it’s printed.

This book is a collection of CSS-based solutions to common web design problems. The solutions range from the simple to the complex, but hopefully everyone will learn something from this book.

CSS is easy to use: it doesn’t demand any special hardware or software. The basic requirements are a computer, a modern browser like Mozilla or Internet Explorer for Windows (to name a few), and your favorite web page editor. A web page editor could be anything from a simple text editor like Window’s Notepad or Macintosh’s SimpleText to a full-fledged WYSIWYG tool like Macromedia Dreamweaver in code view.

Audience

This book is for web designers and developers struggling with the problems of designing with CSS. With this book, web builders can solve common problems associated with CSS-enabled web page designs.

This book is good for people who have wanted to use CSS for web projects, but have shied away from learning a new technology. If you are this type of reader, use the solutions in the book one or a few at a time. Use it as a guidebook and come back to it when you are ready or need to learn another technique or trick.

If you consider yourself an expert with CSS but not an expert in basic design knowledge, this book is useful to have by the side of your computer. It covers elements of design from web typography to page layouts, and a motivational chapter (Chapter 10) is included.