Customer Reviews

HTML Style Sheets Design Guide: The Web Professional's Guide to Building and Using Style Sheets

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Don't be seduced by this book's lavish cover or large-format, its 60-page color section or the considerable writing experience of the three authors. This book's potentially timely and valuable information is crippled by the publisher's decision to get this book on the shelves without benefit of the least editorial proofing.

Page after page of obvious problems completely undermine your confidence in the technical content. Statements like "The Times font is probably the most commonly used font written in languages using Arabic letters." (p114) surely won't convince you that the authors have something to teach you in the way of fontfaces.

Poorly thought-out and unimaginative illustrations have only a tenuous relation to text. Sometimes they have no relation. On p105, the authors "illustrate" the block nature of a list-item with a picture of Felix the Cat in a non-browser window labelled "Animated Gifs". Another example shows us Lotus Notes instead of Netscape.

It is clear that technical facts have not been thoroughly checked. This is very important in an area where published standards are not completely implemented and there are wide variations in the type of implementation across browsers and platforms. We are told that "font size (sic) and font weight (tsk tsk) are abbreviated using the slash (12pt/14pt)." No, font-size and line-height are abbreviated that way.

The book is poorly indexed, but that is normal for computer books. What is abnormal is that the color section, about one-third of the book, has not been indexed at all! Especially amusing was the 5 full-color pages gushing about Time Magazine's exemplary use of style sheets *without one line* of code to back up the authors' esteem.

No, this is one beautiful book best admired from afar.

With the introduction of the Microsoft and Netscape 4.0 series Web browsers new and exciting Web development design options have arrived on the scene. Touted as a method of quickly designing and updating HTML documents, Style Sheets programming promises an easier and quicker way to produce cutting-edge results!

The authors demonstrate throughout this book some really innovative approaches to designing Websites. Readers will learn how to creatively add color to their Web pages, how to set margins as never before, how to prescisely control element positioning. how to indent text, how to manage font properties, and more. Readers will learn how to graduate from basic HTML to this higher level of programming challenge! Actual Websites and sample Web pages are provided to demonstrate this latest concept in Web design.

The book features plenty of sample exercises readers can work through. They provide a variety of layout options and illustrations of style and structure. The CD that accompanies the book is loaded with all of the sample style sheets source code from the book as well as software programs allowing immediate implementation of Style Sheets programming.

Coriolis rates this book for intermediate through advanced users. I concur. Beginners will have a difficult finding their way through this book but the rewards can be great for those who can master this Web development programming tool!