Introduction 7
tricks — some that can take years to discover on your own. (Believe me, some
of them have taken me years to stumble upon.) You also see how to exploit
HTML and scripting in the context of CSS design. As you’ll discover, it’s fasci-
nating to make these technologies stand together and kick high in the air as
one, as if they were a single organism. Kinda like the Rockettes.Many people think that HTML is impossibly difficult and that scripting (pro-
gramming in the classic meaning of the term) is even more difficult. They
don’t have to be.In fact, you find solutions in this book that you can simply copy. Just copy
and paste a few lines of code, for example, to be able to automatically change
your CSS styles while the user is viewing your page in the browser. In other
words, you can, for instance, resize a paragraph if the user clicks on it. The
paragraph’s font-sizestyle can change in response to events like a click. Or,
you can set up a timer that makes things happen after a period of delay, or on
regular intervals. This sort of thing amplifies your CSS designs and is worth
adding to your bag of designer tricks.This book tells you if a particular wheel has already been invented. It also
shows you how to save time by using or modifying existing Web pages to fit
your needs, instead of building new solutions from scratch. But if you’re doing
something totally original (congratulations!), this book also gives you step-by-
step recipes for tackling all the CSS tasks from the ground up.Foolish Assumptions ......................................................................................
In writing this book, I had to make a few assumptions about you, dear reader.
I assume that you know how to use a computer, its mouse, and other parts.I also assume that you don’t know much, if anything, about CSS programming.
Perhaps most importantly, I assume that you don’t want lots of theory or
extraneous details. You just want to get Web design jobs done, not sit around
listening to airy theory about complex selector inheritance and such. When
a job can be done in CSS, I show you how. When you need to reach out to the
more advanced scripts or HTML techniques, I show you that, too. Whatever
it takes, the job gets done.You do end up understanding all about inheritance and selectors and how
they work. It’s just that you don’t have to sit through a lecture on the abstract
philosophy underlying CSS behaviors. You’d fall asleep, believe me. Instead,
you get practical advice, and all the necessary information you need to make
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