HTML & CSS: The Good Parts

Preface

HTML and CSS are old technologies that have seen over a decade of use and continue to evolve. Web developers celebrating their fifteenth year of work have seen all kinds of projects built across a wide variety of browsers, experimented with different features, and noted their successes and failures.

Despite their best efforts, the people who created HTML and CSS didn’t always get it right. Some experiments didn’t work out very well. At the same time, some pieces proved even more useful than expected. Mastering these technologies requires figuring out which pieces of the specs are cruft, in urgent need of abandonment, and which are gold, deserving maximum use. Focusing on HTML and CSS best practices does more than help you create sites that work: it lets you build more effective sites more efficiently, with much lighter long-term maintenance costs.

The Who and What of This Book

Hopefully you’re holding this book because you read a glowing review on one of your favorite websites, or because somebody you know said that you absolutely need to read it. (An author can dream.)

Still, you need more information than that. Is this book for you?

If you and your priorities are described in the paragraphs that follow, then you should walk out of the store with this book under your arm, or at least sit down in the nearest available chair and start reading.

What Are the Good Parts?

There’s no getting around the fact that long stretches of HTML and CSS are boring. I mean sleep-through-it boring. ...