CSS: Style Sheet Guidelines (3)
The NYPL Style Guide cannot possibly teach you all there is to know about CSS. But the following resources will get you up to speed:
Online Guides & Articles
- CSS Guide
- John Allsopp’s complete online tutorial
- Fear of Style Sheets
- A gentle introduction from alistapart.com, plus tips on “no-fault CSS” to accommodate bad browsers (1998-1999)
- Fear of Style Sheets 4
- From alistapart.com, showing how type sizes fail in CSS and explaining why CSS pixels are the only sure means of controlling type size on the web; however, since CSS pixels can create an accessibility hazard ...
- Size Matters
- ... Todd Fahrner, an invited expert to the W3C’s CSS Working Group, shows how to work around font–size keyword implementation flaws in Netscape 4 and IE4/5 (Win) to control type sizes while maintaining accessibility (from alistapart.com)
- Little Boxes
- Owen Briggs’s clickable CSS layouts (Open Source)
- A Web Designer's Journey
- From alistapart.com: showing how to design sites exclusively in CSS, work with the CSS box model, and use different types of links to turn off CSS in bad browsers
- Practical CSS Layout Tips, Tricks, & Techniques
- From alistapart.com: Mark Newhouse shows more ways to use CSS to replace (X)HTML tables
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Online Tools & Advanced Information
- CSS Validator
- Check your Style Sheet for errors
- 1-click validators
- One–click validation "bookmarklets" from David Lindquist
- Favelets
- Advanced CSS "bookmarklets" (IE only)
- Web Review Master Compatibility Chart
- More than you ever wanted to know about poor CSS support in browsers, compiled by Eric Meyer
- SelectORacle
- English translations of CSS–2 selectors (advanced)
- Box Model Hack
- Working around the flaws in IE5/Windows’s CSS Box Model (advanced)
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Books
- Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web
- by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos (Addison-Wesley: 1997)
- Though hardly recent (1997), this book has the advantage of having been written by world-class experts. Lie and Bos are W3C members, and Lie is widely considered “the father of CSS.”
- Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide
- by Eric Meyer (O'Reilly: 2001)
- Eric Meyer is a world expert on CSS, an invited expert to the W3C's CSS Working Group, and currently serves as the Web standards evangelist for Netscape Communications (which is one reason Netscape 6.01 is so much better than Netscape 6.0). His book is both advanced and comprehensive.
- Taking Your Talent to the Web
- by Jeffrey Zeldman (New Riders: 2001)
- Zeldman is a web designer, CSS advocate, and group leader of The Web Standards Project. His book is written for graphic designers and intermediate developers, and its chapter on CSS clarifies many issues while helping you avoid the snares of bad browsers. Disclosure: Zeldman helped prepare this Style Guide.
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The next section presents Style Sheets for your use on NYPL projects. »
« CSS Section Index | Steal These Style Sheets! »
