Simply put, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a way to separate a document’s structure from its presentation. The benefits of this can be quite profound: CSS allows a much richer document appearance than HTML and also saves time — you can create or change the appearance of an entire document in just one place; and its compact file size makes web pages load quickly.
CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition, provides you with a comprehensive guide to CSS implementation, along with a thorough review of all aspects of CSS 2.1. Updated to cover Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft’s vastly improved browser, this new edition includes content on positioning, lists and generated content, table layout, user interface, paged media, and more. Author Eric Meyer tackles the subject with passion, exploring in detail each individual CSS property and how it interacts with other properties. You’ll not only learn how to avoid common mistakes in interpretation, you also will benefit from the depth and breadth of his experience and his clear and honest style. This is the complete sourcebook on CSS.

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.

What you're holding in your hands right now, assuming you aren't viewing a preview online, is more or less a sequel to Eric Meyer on CSS, which was published in 2002 to fairly resounding acclaim. The project-based approach drew high marks, and it seems that a lot of people liked the feeling of being able to watch over my shoulder as I worked through the projects. That was exactly the feeling I aimed to provide, and I've endeavored to create the same feeling with this book.

So, if you do buy this book and you like it, you can get more of the same in Eric Meyer on CSS. On the other hand, it's important to note that you don't have to own Eric Meyer on CSS to use and enjoy this book. Each stands on its own as a self-contained, independent work. So don't be afraid that you won't be able to understand what the characters in this book are doing because you never read the first one. I don't have any characters.

There is a plot, though (actually, two of them). The first plot describes a journey of learning and experimentation, wherein our hero (that's you) follows the path of an experienced guide and learns the ways of a new and wondrous land. The second plot (kind of a subplot) is an underhanded attempt to lure you into using more CSS by tempting you with design flexibility, improved accessibility, reduced page weight, and cool visual effects.

Mod_rewrite, frequently called the “Swiss Army Knife” of URL manipulation, is one of the most popular—and least understood—modules in the Apache Web Server’s bag of tricks. In this chapter we’ll discuss what it is, why it’s necessary, and the basics of using it. For many people, mod_rewrite rules, and regular expressions in general, are magical incantations that they mutter over their website to make it do wondrous things. If the results are not quite what they wanted, they’ll add a pinch of this and a smidgen of that, in the hopes that doing so will nudge it in the right direction.

The goal of this book is to assist you in moving to a place where crafting a rewrite rule set is a scientific process, with predictable results. You’ll know what difference a particular change will make, and you’ll be able to determine, by reading a rule that has been handed to you, what it will do or why it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do.

While many books spend the first chapter telling you lots of stuff you already know, I’ll try to get past that as quickly as possible. In this chapter, we’re going to discuss the basics of mod_rewrite and why you’d want to use it, as well as some of the alternatives to mod_rewrite. This latter topic can also be thought of as “when not to use mod_rewrite.”

Many of the issues that mod_rewrite addresses could be much better solved some other way. Thus, many of the “How do I use mod_rewrite to do X?” questions will be answered with “You don’t use mod_rewrite to do that; you use something else.”