Foreword

Six years. That’s how long it’s been since CSS was first unleashed upon the Web, with the publication of the CSS1 Specification and the release of Internet Explorer 3 for Windows. When Netscape 4 came along the next year, we had a case of two browsers supporting CSS, which seemed like a dream come true. Unfortunately, the dream turned out to be something of a nightmare, since the two browsers barely agreed on anything when it came to CSS, and they had more bugs than they did correct behaviors. And so we entered a dark period of time where the promise of CSS kept luring cutting-edge designers to their doom, dashed against the jagged edges of really bad browser implementations.

Of course, every dark age has its end and is often followed by a frenetic blossoming of ideas, techniques, and advances that would have been previously unthinkable. The most famous of these times, at least in the West, is the Renaissance, the products of which affect us even today. In a way, CSS is experiencing the beginning of its Renaissance, and it’s an incredibly exciting time to be working in web design. It’s almost like the first explosion of web design techniques that followed the advent of the table-and-spacer revolution. That was an exciting time as well, although most of us weren’t aware how much damage we were doing to the structure of the Web. It’s only been in the last couple of years that we’ve had a chance to clean up our mess, and CSS is the fulcrum on which the reclamation of the Web pivots.

So how do I know we’re in a Renaissance? Two reasons, really. The first is that browsers have finally cleaned up their acts and started doing basic things in a consistent way. By this, I’m referring to the very, very good standards support that modern browsers embody. The ability to create pages that display consistently between browsers is the key, and that ability has never been greater. Of course, there are still some problem areas, but that’s part of what keeps the job interesting, right? We can no more expect perfection of our browsers than we can of ourselves—even though we keep pushing for it anyway. In many ways, the calls for improved standards support these days are a plea for some icing on the standards cake, instead of that bleak, bygone era when we begged desperately for any cake at all.

The second thing that tells me we’re entering a Renaissance is the appearance of a book like this one: a good introduction to CSS aimed at designers. For a long time, the leading CSS books (including my own) were targeted at the kinds of people who already understood the HTML specification backward and forward and wrote web pages by hand in Notepad or emacs. That’s to be expected, since most technologies get adopted first by code jockeys.

But CSS is a visual language, one that was meant to be used by designers from the beginning. Books aimed at that particular audience are long overdue, frankly, and I’m thrilled to see them emerging at long last. I’m even more thrilled that we’re getting one from Molly Holzschlag.

I’ll never forget the first time I came into contact with Molly. I was writing CSS articles for Web Review, and she had just taken over as Executive Editor. We swapped a few e-mails back and forth and got along smashingly from the word go. Molly’s one of those people who’s hard not to get along with, really. Eventually, in response to a comment from me, Molly pointed me to a page on her website that had some portraits of her. I fired up a web browser and took a look.

“Wow,” said my wife Kat, leaning over my shoulder to peer at the monitor, “she’s really beautiful.”

At the time, we had no idea how right Kat was. We’ve since discovered that Molly truly is a beautiful person in so many ways, it would get sort of embarrassing to list them all here, so I’ll settle for the one thing that stands out most when I think of Molly: her terrific sense of humor. This made me really happy when Molly was my editor at Web Review. I always like to work with an editor with a sense of humor. It keeps them from getting too worked up over my stunningly casual attitude toward writing schedules.

There have been many conferences where the best time of the whole week was just hanging out with Molly (and optionally other web folks) in some hotel bar, chatting randomly and cracking jokes, like a sitcom writers’ summit gone deeply geeky. It’s always a pleasure to make Molly laugh, because she has a great laugh. A very distinctive one, I might add. It makes it a lot easier to find her at crowded receptions; just wait for someone to amuse her. Failing that, just look for the biggest, noisiest, cheeriest knot of people. The odds are that Molly is somewhere very near the center of that knot.

Spend any time around her, you get to pretty much one unavoidable conclusion: Molly is a character. That’s good. The industry needs more characters, because they make things interesting, and more fun, on a personal level.

You might think from all this that Molly is less than serious about her work. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve seen Molly teach classes, and I’ve been privileged to co-teach a day-long seminar on XHTML and CSS with her. Molly is one of those rare people who is bright enough to understand the technology, eloquent enough to explain it, and empathetic enough to instinctively know where students are likely to run into trouble—and to lead them around the pitfalls before anyone falls in. If somebody does stumble, Molly is right there to help them up with a more detailed explanation, an illuminating example, or simply an encouraging word. She is deeply committed not only to teaching, but to teaching well.

Molly truly wants to share as much of her knowledge and skills with as many people as she can possibly manage, and you can see it in every word. I commend you to her capable hands and hope you will find CSS as fascinating as I do, six years later and still counting.

Eric A. Meyer
www.meyerweb.com
December 2002
Cleveland, Ohio