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

Book Description

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) enable us to style and lay out HTML data on a web page without the use of messy and tags, and without the use of "hacks" such as invisible GIF files. CSS allows for the separation of content from presentation, so that web designers can change the entire design of a site by modifying one stylesheet, rather than updating each HTML document that makes up the web site.

This book is a focused, no-fluff coverage of the how to use CSS and XHTML for the visual design of web pages. Its practical techniques will give you core CSS skills, as well as showing how to apply them in today's browsers.

This book covers:

Introduction to CSS
LSS concepts, such as: rules, selectors, inheritance, and cascade
Typography
The CSS box model
Cross-browser CSS

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13 Reviews

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4.4 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Great book for experts and beginners!, Jun 14 2004

Kirupa Chinnathambi "Computer/Design Geek" (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation (Paperback)

Over the years, CSS has helped change the way information is displayed on the web. Since its inception, CSS has evolved into a full-featured language capable of formatting not only text but almost all elements of a web site such as tables, lists, and more. CSS is not the easiest language to learn, but a book such as this helps.

Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation by Owen Briggs, Steven Champeon, Eric Costello, Matt Patterson, is a great way to not only be introduced to CSS but also to learn the details that will ultimately help you to design or convert existing sites using the CSS language. The book introduces you to simple CSS formatting involving text and other web elements such as lists, tables, and more. After relishing some of the simple formatting concepts, the book guides you through the more complicated process of creating layouts using CSS.

Beyond direct applications of CSS, the authors explain some subtle issues that you will encounter while using CSS. While CSS is standardized by the W3C organization, the implementation of CSS varies across various browsers. The authors do an excellent job of covering some of the inconsistencies and how to resolve them. You are provided specific examples of code, and you are also given code that would help older browsers into displaying CSS-based layouts.

The book also takes interesting breaks from explaining CSS concepts and provides insights into unique features about CSS that are cool to know! One such section, explains how to make your pages downgrade gracefully and display properly in text-only browsers.

The various authors present the information very clearly, and you, towards the end of the book, will have learned how to not only use but also implement CSS in your design solutions. To aid you in your quest of applying what you have learned, the authors provide sample projects and brief guidelines before sending you off on a full filled CSS coding journey.

This is a great book for beginners and advanced users of CSS to learn and reference from.

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3.0 out of 5 stars Fine but nothing unique, Aug 30 2003

Andrew Otwell "heyotwell" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation (Paperback)

This book is perfectly fine if you can't be bothered to seek out most of this information online. The authors' own websites are actually some of the best places to start. But the book is useful, even down to the entire chapter devoted to analyzing Netscape 4's CSS abilities--something most others will simply not cover.

However, the price of this book is about two times too high. It's short, with no CD, but it runs as much as many of the "phone-book" tech books. This is a fifteen-dollar value, no more.

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3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing: useful but not enough, and often confusing, July 12 2003

Arnaud H (Lakeport, Californie) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation (Paperback)

This book's first chapter is about the only one that is clear. The rest of the chapters are unfortunately not well presented and structured. The examples and the CSS examples are laid out in very confusing ways. It is very often difficult to tell which snippet of code matches which screenshot. In that respect, chapter 7 is a nightmare.
Also cruelly missing from the book are a list of all possibly attributes for each property.
You will not be able to learn CSS entirely from this book. You will have to either buy another more comprehensive book, or to use Web tutorials.

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply great.
This book is very well written. It is the first technical book that I have read cover-to-cover in years.

Published on May 4 2003

4.0 out of 5 stars Lacks detail in key areas
Overall, this is an outstanding text for learning CSS and how to appropriately use it with HTML and XHTML. Read more

Published on Mar 27 2003 by J. M. House

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely necessary title for your work in the long run
Dabblers in web design may skip this book for now. But if you are serious about investing your time and energy in web design and development, particularly if you are still mixing... Read more

Published on Mar 7 2003 by richardpinneau.com

4.0 out of 5 stars Great way to start, but.....
As an olde timey graphics type (remember Rapidiograph pens and Rubylith anyone?) that has made the leap to HTML, I have found CSS to be the missing boone to those that still... Read more

Published on Feb 16 2003 by David Godsey

4.0 out of 5 stars Something to say to beginners and experts alike
A book that has something to say to beginners and experts alike. The authors managed to condensate a huge amount of informations, both on CSS theory and practical implementation... Read more

Published on Jan 12 2003 by Foti Massimo

5.0 out of 5 stars Something to say to beginners and experts alike
A book that has something to say to beginners and experts alike. The authors managed to condensate a huge amount of informations, both on CSS theory and practical implementation... Read more

Published on Jan 10 2003 by Foti Massimo

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction to CSS
This book is an excellent introduction to CSS; however, I have a few quibbles with it -- hence, the reason for a loss of one star in my rating of the book. Read more

Published on Sep 17 2002 by snowwyrm

5.0 out of 5 stars Making a Case for CSS
In an easy-to-read 279 pages, the authors guide the reader through the concept of separating content from presentation in web design. Read more

Published on Aug 3 2002 by shigs

5.0 out of 5 stars Good practical information.
This book has a great number of positives.

The chapters on typography and selectors is beyond compare and the discussion on 'flow' within a page works should be required reading... Read more

Published on July 18 2002 by James E. Bennett

5.0 out of 5 stars No Hacks!
This is a solid book for the *serious* beginning or intermediate Web worker who recognizes that CSS is -and will be- a technique essential to their career. Read more

Published on May 31 2002 by Brett Merkey