Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer’s Reference - Eric Meyer

In the beginning, there was HTML. And it was pretty good, but not great. You couldn’t really create nifty visual designs with it, which gave rise to table-based layout and single-pixel GIF tricks. And that was pretty bad. So CSS was born, and it was very good—in theory, anyway. There was a long struggle to make CSS a viable technology, thanks to imperfect interpretations of the specification, but lo! The day arrived when CSS could be used without fear and dread. And the people rejoiced.

Thanks to CSS, designers can cut back on the FONT and table tricks they’ve been forced to cobble together, and dramatically clean up their markup. With the coming of XHTML and XML, both of which are deeply semantic and must rely on some styling mechanism to become visually appealing, CSS is growing more and more popular. It’s a flexible, easy-to-understand language which offers designers a lot of power. Because it reduces markup clutter, it makes pages easier to maintain. And its centralized styling abilities lets designers adjust page layout with quick, easy edits of the styles, not dramatic changes to the markup. In fact, CSS makes it possible to completely reshape the look of a document without changing a single character inside the BODY element.

This book endeavors to efficiently describe the properties and values of CSS2, which was the latest CSS standard when the book was written, and to provide details on property interactions, common authoring mistakes, and other information which designers should find useful.

The text has been arranged to present basic concepts first, with details on important CSS algorithms and behaviors (Chapter 1). This is followed with “core” information which describes the types of values that can be used in CSS2 (Chapter 2), and the various ways in which elements can be selected for styling (Chapter 3). This first part of the book does its best to describe the foundation of CSS, for the rest of it would not function without the values and concepts presented.

The middle of the book (Chapters 4 through 6) is the largest portion, and is probably the area where readers will spend the most time—all of the properties found in CSS2 are defined, described, and annotated with notes. These properties are broken up into separate chapters, with Chapter 4 devoted to visual-media properties, Chapter 5 to paged-media properties, and Chapter 6 to aural-media properties.

Each property is described in terms of its allowed values, its initial (or default) value, and other common aspects. There are also detailed descriptions of the meaning of each allowed value, notes about how the property works, examples of the property in use, and a list of related properties.

The final part of the book (Chapters 7 through 9) contains other useful information about CSS, including a browser support chart, a CSS2 property quick reference, and a list of useful online resources. Between the contents of this book and the resources provided, it should be possible to decipher any CSS conundrums you may encounter. Although CSS can sometimes seem a bit mystifying, it is more than worth the effort of learning its secrets. Enjoy!

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