Create Sean: Journey to Professional Designer

I heard some buzz about Everything You Know about CSS is Wrong, by Rachel Andrew & Kevin Yank and decided to order the book through Sitepoint. I ordered the hard copy as I don’t like reading on screen. Upon recieving the book my initial reaction was; this book is small. The page size is small and there are only 111 pages many of those with screenshots.

it is now up to designers to move the web forward. The opening chapter breifly discusses the history of browsers, design for layout, the implementation of CSS and issues designers have had with Internet Explorer and ends with the good news that IE 8 is coming and has passed the Acid2 test. According to the authors this means that it is now up to designers to move the web forward.

Chapter two looks at current techniques for layout in CSS and the hacks used to achieve the desired look, including floats, faux columns and absolute position. It then looks at the flaws of each approach. Finally the same sample web site is built using CSS tables. The authors discuss the display properties used to turn elements into tables - table-row, table-cell, table-row-group, table-header-group, table-footer-group, table-caption, table-column, table-column-group and anonymous table elements. I find the anonymous table elements particularly intriguing as they will potentially reduce markup.

The authors also clarify the difference between CSS tables and HTML tables. CSS tables are about controlling how elements display whereas HTML tables are about organizing tabular data.

Chapter three looks at practical applications including flexible layouts, nested tables, and positioning inside a cellChapter three looks at practical applications including flexible layouts, nested tables, and positioning inside a cell.  The reader is also introduced to a way to simulate colspan and rowspan. Might one call this a hack? Not sure, since I’ve never done any tables based development.  Source order is looked at - it’s not possible to reorder elements as everything needs to be placed in the order columns are displayed. The exceptions are table-footer-group & table-header-group which can be placed anywhere and will display correctly.

Chapter four addresses older browsers. The basic recommendation is that developers should say “To Hell with Bad Browsers”. That is to say we should design with modern CSS specifications and allow older browsers (IE 6 & 7) display as they will. The authors do offer some solutions including providing a simplified layout for IE6 & 7 using conditional comments. The final option would be to reproduce the layout using current methods in an IE only stylesheet. The benefits according to the authors are greater ease of development and stability. Instead of having to deal with browswer inconsistencies due to hacking CSS to display the grid with floats everything just works (except with IE7 and earlier).

At the begining of this chapter the reader is informed that History Repeats. That is developers should do what was done in 2001 and advocate that users upgrade their browsers by giving them a reason to upgrade - a better internet experience. Save the Developers is recommended for the modern movement - interestingly this site now redirects to a microsoft Internet Explorer page.

The final chapter was very intersting to read about forthcoming CSS3 specifications. However it’s nothing to get overly excited about since it’s not going to be a practical reality for some time to come.

final thoughts

Everything you Know about CSS is Wrong is an engaging read and provides insight into using CSS tables. I’m determined to try this on a couple of personal sites, but am pretty sure I won’t be moving towards CSS tables for client sites until the market shows it’s a more viable option. Anyhow we’ll see what happens - according to wikipedia IE8 final version is slated to be released late 2008. With only seven weeks left in 2008 that should be really soon.

At $29.95 plus shipping I do not think this book was worth the money. It’s far too short - it only took me 90 minutes to read the whole book. If you can read on a screen then I would recommend getting the pdf version.