Review: More Eric Meyer on CSS · 280 words posted 05/27/2004 04:10 PM
Eric A. Meyer’s fifth book, More Eric Meyer on CSS, consists of 10 projects designed to help you separate your site’s appearance from its content. Each project explores many of the layout challenges you’re likely to encounter when building a site.
Wait a minute, says the reader, why are YOU writing a review of a CSS book? You use a default MovableType template, and you’ve publicly admitted that you don’t even have a firm grasp of the box model hack!
Fair enough.
But here’s why you should study a book of CSS projects even if you’re a programmer who cares not a whit for design: Assume that you need to display a gallery of images, with src attributes generated from database content. This requirement often means writing code to generate a table that displays rows and columns of images. It also means that when your client changes her mind about the page’s appearance—“we want x columns instead of y”—you have to change your code.
Or, as Mr. Meyer demonstrates in one of the book’s projects, you can simply generate an unordered list of images, each enclosed in a div, and then use CSS to create a columnar layout that automatically changes when the page is resized.
Although the book is not targeted toward programmers (and contains no server-side code), it contains enough great ideas for layouts that you can forget about struggling with tables and JavaScript menu hacks, and concentrate your programming time on serving up semantically meaningful markup.
The next time a client requests an interface change, buy this book for your designer and send Mr. Meyer a box of chocolates. They’ll both thank you.
~~~
Buy this book from Amazon.
* * *