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Entry tags:
More fun with CSS
Although CSS positioning and I seem to be in a state of active hostility, as I blunder along I am finding more and more evidence of how incredibly powerful and complex the CSS 2 + system is (if only so for everything but layout).
I've been looking over Opera's online design education material, posted as part of their education efforts. The Table of Contents gives a hint of the scope of the material and it's depth and complexity even in the first few basic lessons are humbling (So many selectors!). I'm still trying to digest the whole of their piece on List and Link styling, which contained such revelations as how to replace the list item bullet with an arbitrary graphic and how to display a list horizontally. It's not that these tricks are hard. I would say that it's more the consciousness expansion of seeing it explained that helps to break the hold of HTML 2 (or whatever) on your mind.
So, to give a taste of the sheer power of CSS without quite so much complexity or fright, I recommend "The CSS Anarchist's Cookbook", an older article by the O'Reilly CSS Guide
author which explains various amusing ways to use CSS user stylesheets to overcome web annoyances. Another of his pieces from that same era "Using CSS as a Diagnostic Tool" is also quite educational and useful even now. Some of the examples (checking for alt tags) are also covered in greater depth and complexity in the Opera material.
If you are really interested in this stuff or want to see how crazy it can get, you must read "Printing a Book With CSS: Boom!", wherein CSS book authors explain how they used CSS3 and standard extensions to describe the page layout for their site as a printed book and process it to PDF with the Prince formatter (also used by PragProg for on-demand PDF generation ). The book authors used their finding to develop a microformat which they make available as well.
I should point out that I got most of these links from the W3C's Learning CSS page, which is certainly worth a look. You will learn a few CSS tricks you may not have known about just by mousing around that page. I started in with the Head First
book on XHTML and CSS. It is fantastic and I recommend it to anyone just beginning to deal with any of this. I am still looking for a follow-up book to help me with the more advanced material.
I've been looking over Opera's online design education material, posted as part of their education efforts. The Table of Contents gives a hint of the scope of the material and it's depth and complexity even in the first few basic lessons are humbling (So many selectors!). I'm still trying to digest the whole of their piece on List and Link styling, which contained such revelations as how to replace the list item bullet with an arbitrary graphic and how to display a list horizontally. It's not that these tricks are hard. I would say that it's more the consciousness expansion of seeing it explained that helps to break the hold of HTML 2 (or whatever) on your mind.
So, to give a taste of the sheer power of CSS without quite so much complexity or fright, I recommend "The CSS Anarchist's Cookbook", an older article by the O'Reilly CSS Guide
author which explains various amusing ways to use CSS user stylesheets to overcome web annoyances. Another of his pieces from that same era "Using CSS as a Diagnostic Tool" is also quite educational and useful even now. Some of the examples (checking for alt tags) are also covered in greater depth and complexity in the Opera material.If you are really interested in this stuff or want to see how crazy it can get, you must read "Printing a Book With CSS: Boom!", wherein CSS book authors explain how they used CSS3 and standard extensions to describe the page layout for their site as a printed book and process it to PDF with the Prince formatter (also used by PragProg for on-demand PDF generation ). The book authors used their finding to develop a microformat which they make available as well.
I should point out that I got most of these links from the W3C's Learning CSS page, which is certainly worth a look. You will learn a few CSS tricks you may not have known about just by mousing around that page. I started in with the Head First
book on XHTML and CSS. It is fantastic and I recommend it to anyone just beginning to deal with any of this. I am still looking for a follow-up book to help me with the more advanced material.