Preface

Since its introduction in 1996, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has revolutionized Web design. Now, in 2004, most Web pages use CSS, and many designers base their layouts entirely on CSS. To do so successfully requires a good understanding of how CSS works. The purpose of this book is to describe how designers can take full advantage of CSS 2.1, which is the newly released update of the specification.

CSS's journey from an idea to a specification and then on to a specification designers can rely on has been long and arderous. The creator of the CSS Zen Garden (described in Chapter 11, "From HTML extensions to CSS") describes it this way:

Littering a dark and dreary road lay the past relics of browser-specific tags, incompatible DOMs, and broken CSS support. Today, we must clear the mind of past practices. Web enlightenment has been achieved thanks to the tireless efforts of folk like the W3C, WaSP, and the major browser creators.

Indeed, we believe that the web is a more enlightened place now that CSS has matured to a stage where it can be used for advanced layouts in a range of browsers. This book tells you all you need to know to start using CSS.