CSS Cookbook, 3rd Edition

Preface

Every book tells a story—even books on web design tips and techniques.

This book is about Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS as it’s commonly abbreviated. CSS is a simple standardized syntax that gives designers extensive control over the presentation of their web pages and is an essential component of web design today.

Compared to 1990s-era development techniques, CSS gives web designers greater control over their designs so that they can spend less time editing and maintaining their websites. CSS also extends beyond traditional web design to designing and controlling the look of a web page when it is printed.

You don’t need any special hardware or software to design web pages. The basic requirements are a computer, a modern browser such as Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer for Windows (to name a few), and your favorite web page editor. A web page editor can be anything from a simple text editor such as Notepad (for Windows) or TextEdit (for the Mac), to a full-fledged WYSIWYG tool such as Adobe Dreamweaver set in code view.

Now you know what the book is about. Let me tell you its story, its history.

Some would say web design officially began when Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, put together the first set of web pages. Others would say it began when the center tag came about due to Netscape’s own extension of HTML.

Though it might seem ironic, I happen to believe that this new media really got started with books. The books that helped lead the way to the dot-com ...