CSS: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. Improving Your CSS Habits

At this point, we've covered most aspects of Cascading Style Sheets. With the addition of CSS-based layout, which you learned about in Part III, you're now an unstoppable Web-designing machine. But even after you've mastered all the properties CSS offers, nailed those annoying browser bugs, and learned great tricks for producing beautiful Web pages, you can still stand to learn a few techniques that'll make your CSS easier to create, use, and maintain.

This chapter covers some recommendations for creating and using CSS. None of them count as "must know" CSS essentials, but they can make your CSS work go faster, leading to less frustration and greater productivity.

Adding Comments

When it's time to edit a style sheet weeks, months or even years after creating it, you may find yourself wondering "Why'd I create that style? What does it do?" As with any project, when building a Web site, you should keep notes of what you did and why. Fortunately, you don't need a pad of paper to do this. You can embed your notes right into your style sheets using CSS comments.

A CSS comment is simply a note contained within two sets of characters, /* and */. As with HTML comments, CSS comments aren't read or acted on by a Web browser, but they do let you add helpful reminders to your style sheets. Say you created a style intended to solve an Internet Explorer bug:

	* html .imageFloat {
	    display: inline;
	}

At the time you wrote the style, you knew what you were doing, ...