Wednesday, May 28, 2008
HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using Css
Author: Rachel Andrew and Dan Shafer
I grew up as a developer who got used to what a fellow developer at artemis (www.artemis-solutions.com) once described as "Table Kung-fu". Table kung-fu became our word for layouts using tables. Only Stan (the web) seems to "get it".
I have slowly migrated to layouts with divs and css ever since but mostly by little articles that pointed out a little at a time or by asking "lots of questions" from colleagues and google. I understood a lot of css now (now being before this book) but like every informal education, there are a lot of loopholes where you apply your own custom "Holly hacks".
This book formalized my education.
I can proudly say that I fully understand 3 column layouts now, plus I got a lot of interesting pointers to interesting sites like http://www.alistapart.com among others. Quite an interesting read.
After going through the book, you get a good reference for named colors and css attributes at the appendices.
Highlights:
I grew up as a developer who got used to what a fellow developer at artemis (www.artemis-solutions.com) once described as "Table Kung-fu". Table kung-fu became our word for layouts using tables. Only Stan (the web) seems to "get it".
I have slowly migrated to layouts with divs and css ever since but mostly by little articles that pointed out a little at a time or by asking "lots of questions" from colleagues and google. I understood a lot of css now (now being before this book) but like every informal education, there are a lot of loopholes where you apply your own custom "Holly hacks".
This book formalized my education.
I can proudly say that I fully understand 3 column layouts now, plus I got a lot of interesting pointers to interesting sites like http://www.alistapart.com among others. Quite an interesting read.
After going through the book, you get a good reference for named colors and css attributes at the appendices.
Highlights:
- Inheritance and the cascade in cascading style sheet
- Expression measurement
- Accessibility
- 2 column and 3 column layouts using positional syntax and floats
- Browser compatibility issues
After this, you can safely depart from the era of table Kung-fu. And if you are thinking this education may be coming too late as we've entered into the new era of web 2.o and all the interesting developments around flex, silverlight to mention a few, experience tells me nothing is wasted.
¶ 10:32 PM
