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Introduction 3

with many step-by-step examples showing how to manage the various ele-

ments of CSS, including:

How to design Web pages without using tables


Understanding CSS inheritance

Best coding techniques


Page elements (spacing, fonts, colors, and so on)

Practical ways to integrate CSS into new or existing Web sites


Syntax rules, properties, and values

How CSS works together with HTML and scripting


Embedded and external style sheets

Advanced visual effects such as transitions


Selectors and declarations

The latest CSS3 features

The End of the Browser Wars ........................................................................

CSS has been available for several years, but, like DHTML (dynamic HTML for

Web page animation effects), CSS languished because of the browser wars.

Basically, Netscape’s Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer attempted

to enforce different, proprietary standards. Now that Netscape is all but dead

in the marketplace and standards have become relatively stable because of

the dominance of Internet Explorer, CSS has become a major technology for

the creation and design of first-rate Web sites. Some incompatibility issues

still exist, but this book deals with them only occasionally. Why? Because often

you need not write complex, workaround code to take into account an audi-

ence so small that, practically speaking, many Web pages simply ignore them.

That said, I realize that some designers are forced to deal with browser com-

patibility issues, so I do explore the topic in some depth in Chapter 17. You

see how to detect which browser and version the user has and how to take

appropriate steps to deal with it in your Web page code. I also tell you where

to find the best compatibility charts online; how to see what your page looks

like and test its behavior in non-compliant browsers; and how to automati-

cally redirect a browser to a different Web page or Web site if that browser

can’t deal with your CSS code.

A few years ago, people were moving from Netscape to Internet Explorer, but

a large percent of your Web site’s audience was still using Netscape. You had to

write CSS (and HTML and scripting) that worked effectively in both browsers.

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