Stylin
Overall Impression
Having read and loved Eric Meyer’s books on CSS, I was more than a little skeptical that Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide, from Charles Wyke-Smith would add any significant stock to my hacked together repository of CSS knowledge. I was wrong.
From design comments to sage coding advice, this book is written clearly, concisely, and in a friendly, conversational tone.
Wyke-Smith discusses commenting code on page 20.
I comment my code heavily, especially with what I call ’start comments’ that show me where each section of my document starts … If you comment the beginning and end of any div that is likely to have more than a few lines of code in it, you can quickly and confidently make major edits as you organize your markup.
While this advice might be perfectly obvious to programmers, some designers (guess who) find that organizing and commenting code does not come easily.
But the book is not all about code. On page 68, Wyke-Smith discusses the importance of typography.
Type makes the clearest visual statement about the quality of your site’s offerings. Graphics are the icing on the cake; typography is where good design begins.
This is a good reminder for any designer who has ever let graphics overpower type (probably all of us).
Conceptual Understanding
The initial chapters of the book, while practical, lay a solid conceptual framework for the detailed design projects at its end. Notable examples of this are a line by line examination of the code of an XHTML document, a few paragraphs on the XHTML document hierarchy, and a detailed treatment of the CSS cascade and what it means for targeting document tags contextually. A common confusion among CSS newbies has to do with the difference between an ID and a class. Wyke-Smith clears up any confusion swiftly.
There is a great deal of conceptual knowledge sprinkled throughout Stylin’. Chapter 8 starts with an excellent discussion of static, relative, fixed, and absolute positioning. For added clarification of these positioning options, Wyke-Smith adds a definition of contextual positioning.
Put simply, contextual positioning means that when you move an element using the properties top, left, right, or bottom, you are moving that element with respect to another element; that other element is known as its positioning context.
Wyke-Smith uses this definition to explain the difference between absolute and relative positioning and says that the positioning context of an absolutely positioned element is body, while the positioning context of a relatively positioned element is its containing element or ancestor element. These comments helped explain in clearer terms concepts that I had learned by trial and error.
Practical Application
If my comments above regarding the book’s conceptual focus were too abstract for you, don’t worry - Stylin’ is also an extremely practical volume. Many workarounds are given for Internet Explorer’s infamous bugs, two and three column layout templates are created step-by-step, and advanced CSS techniques are introduced. By the end of this book, if you do the excercises, you will have used graphics to create faux columns, designed CSS only drop-down menus, styled forms, and created fluid layouts with effective minimum and maximum widths.
What I Learned
I know more about the hierarchical structure of XHTML and how it relates to the CSS cascade, contextual targeting, and inheritance after reading this book. Due to some tips and tricks in the information rich break out boxes and sidebars, I can simplify my code further, keeping prentation and structure more strictly separate, while being confident that I will have enough control over visual presentation with CSS.
Congratulations to Charles Wyke-Smith on this lucidly written book. Now back to some (streamlined) XHTML and CSS projects!
Recommendation: This is one of the first three books on CSS web design that any designer should read. Also read Eric Meyer on CSS and More Eric Meyer on CSS.
Title: Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide
Author: Charles Wyke-Smith
Publisher: New Riders/Peachpit Press
ISBN: 0321305256
Date: 2005
Format: Paperback
Pages: 275
Cover Price: USD: $34.99 CDN: $48.99 UK: �24.99
Related Web Sites
- Peachpit Press
- BBd (Author’s Site)
- Stylin’ (The book’s web site)
- Visual Vocabulary for Information Architecture
- w3schools.com
1 comment June 16th, 2005
