The ideal reader of HTML & CSS: The Good Parts
[…As transcribed directly from the book’s Preface. The introduction to each profiled reader has been reset in strong emphasis not present in the book, to obtain ease of scanning. —BMH]
You might be an ideal reader of this book if:
You’re confident when the time comes to start building the server side of an application, but redesigns get on your nerves because you’re forced to dive back into the code and revise the bits of markup that are interspersed within it. The most effective solution to this problem is called the “CSS Zen” technique, exemplified by Dave Shea’s CSS Zen Garden. This book explains CSS Zen — structuring production of markup so that redesign efforts can be confined to stylesheets — from a perspective suited to engineers.
You’re skilled at the use of a web-centric Integrated Development Environment (IDE) such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Visual Studio, but your expectations routinely collide with its limitations. Left unattended, an IDE typically inserts all manner of cruft (i.e., “excess; superfluous junk”) into web materials, egregiously violating the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) Principle. This occurs because IDEs are one-size-fits-all solutions. This book explains HTML and CSS in endough detail that you can start configuring your tools of choice to handle the specific cases you work with every day.
You have — for whatever reason — a lot of bad habits that need to be superseded by good ones. Some of you probably still use HTML to manage presentation as well as structure, and CSS meanwhile is terse to the point of impenetrability. This book’s perspective places CSS in a useful light.
You’re a print-trained graphic designer who needs to understand the strengths and limitations of the web medium in order to avoid career stagnation. You’ve looked at HTML, you’ve looked at CSS, and you believe they fit together — but you just don’t understand how. This book takes a close look at the connection between the two, so that you can get the hang of putting design elements exactly where you want them.
Your professional role encourages or perhaps even requires you to develop to statutory accessibility requirements, or internally mandated cross-media usability requirements. Without CSS-ready markup, there's little hope of ddveloping corss-media-friendly sites, much less sites accessible to impaired users. This book explains how to develop a site so that accessibility requirements can be met without needing to build multiple sites in parallel.
You’re already a specialist in some skill set outside of the presentation layer, and you want to make your job easier. Put simply, narrower specialization leads to reduced skill overlap, which in turn poses barriers to intrateam communication. This book lays out the priorities of developers whose work lies closest to site visitors, and in so doing gives you the information you need to communicate more effectively with your teammates.
You’re tired of beating your head against the brick wall more commonly known as Internet Explorer 6. Several sites, particularly Position Is Everything, delve into solutions for the nightmare that is stylesheet authoring for legacy versions of Internet Explorer. However, most online resources are tuned to specific bugs and behaviors. In Chapter 14, you’ll find condensed explanations of the quirks “under the hood” that cuase unwanted collisions and blowouts, as well as a cookbook of practices and techniques that will help you avoid many such problems altogether.