Book Review: CSS—The Missing Manual

by Richard Mateosian

CSS—The Missing Manual

David Sawyer McFarland
Pogue, Sebastopol CA, 2006, 494pp, ISBN-13 978-0-596-52687-0
www.missingmanuals.com , $34.99

David Sawyer McFarland is an author, a teacher, and a webmaster. He has designed many websites. Cascading style sheets (CSS) is a language that enables web designers to apply global styles to the raw HTML they use to encode the content of web pages.

When browsers and websites first became popular in the early 1990s, designers were forced to apply font size, color, and other elements of appearance directly to each HTML element (heading, paragraph, and so forth) that they created. There was no mechanism to ensure that every first level heading on a given page, let alone on the whole website, had the same appearance. Furthermore, HTML has only a limited number of ways to control appearance. Sophisticated visual designs required cumbersome misuse of HTML elements (for example, tables).

Designers soon recognized these defects, and CSS was born. But HTML was evolving rapidly, and CSS had a late start. It was not until recently that we had a version of CSS that designers could use effectively with their
designs.

Using CSS is relatively simple, but it requires looking at design in a different way. McFarland explains this viewpoint, then goes on to show how to use each feature of CSS. He also starts with common design problems (for example, styling tables or forms) and shows how to use CSS to solve them.

The Missing Manual series of books fills the need for user centered documentation for many underdocumented products. This book does the same for CSS.