Book Note: Cascading Style Sheets, The Definitive Guide

When I really get worked up about something it is often best to just give in and focus on it until I feel the obsession pass. After waking up early yesterday to play with CSS I decided to spend the day reading this other Eric Meyer CSS book. I'm glad I did. He is a much better technical writer than a teacher. While I had complaints about his pedagogical technique in "Eric Meyer on CSS", I found this book to be extremely clear. He goes through the CSS spec in exhaustive detail without become boring. He really does know his stuff. The best part is that he has a good historical sense of the standard's development. Instead of just saying this is how it is now, he explains how each rule came about in relation to past versions of the spec and past browsers.

I didn't read every page in detail, but I did read the first six or seven chapters and then skimmed the rest. I now know what is available and where to go back for it when needed. The next phase of my design will be to eliminate the major structural tables controlling the two column layout. This seems to be the test of a true CSSer. I know that I'll be coming back to this book repeatedly as I adopt more CSS for my sites.

The only complaint I have with this text is the missed opportunity he touched on in the preface. He explained there that by abandoning structural tags, like H1 and H2, in favor of complex FONT tags, HTML designers had removed valuable structural information about the page's content. This structure could have been used to programmatically extract more meaning from pages. I guess this is obvious, but I hadn't thought about it in years. Unfortunately, he never got back to expanding this idea. It is something I would like to explore further.