Core CSS: Cascading Style Sheets Book

Useful for both Web designers and developers alike, Core CSS Cascading Style Sheets provides a definitive guide to style sheets, which provide a new level of flexibility for browser-based content. With a comprehensive reference to all CSS1 and CSS2 features and an excellent survey of which features work in eight of today's browsers, this book shows off the strengths of style sheets for the next generation of Web content. Particularly for developers, CSS allows a more precise level of control of elements inside browsers. (These abilities make it a lot easier to create Web clients that compete with traditional standalone applications.) But currently, support for CSS in today's browsers is spotty. The strength of this title is that it will let you learn both the CSS1 and CSS2 standards, even if they are still under development. In the meantime, this text shows off what each property is supposed to accomplish with sample HTML and screenshots. The author is careful to note problems with CSS properties in today's browsers. For the CSS1 standard, every property is marked as being "unsafe", "safe" or partially implemented on no less than eight browsers (including Netscape 3 and 4.x, Internet Explore 3 through 5, and Opera for Windows, UNIX and Mac platforms). The second part of the book is devoted to the CSS2 standard with a description of proposed support for Unicode, for formatting Web pages (with "paged media" properties) and for tagging content so that it can be read out loud by computer generated voices. Although still under construction, the CSS1 and CSS2 standards will certainly offer a better Internet for us all. In the meantime, Core CSS Cascading Style Sheets describes what's available in today's browsers right now. It's a solid reference that will make CSS understandable to anyone, regardless of your level of Web expertise. --Richard Dragan, amazon.com Topics covered: Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the CSS1 and CSS2 standards, the browser wars, CSS support on the Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera and Mozilla browsers; basic CSS (grouping, inheritance and contextual selectors), cascading order, CSS units, pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements, font properties, color and background properties, text and box properties, classification properties, new CSS2 features; Unicode support, generated content and automatic numbering for lists, properties for printing Web pages, new table properties, aural style sheets for speech-enabled browsers, CSS1 and CSS2 reference and cross-browser comparison of supported properties.Read More