HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS (Build Your Own) (Paperback)

~ Dan Shafer (Author) "We can look at Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) from a number of contextual perspectives..." (more)
Key Phrases: single property declaration, style rule assigns, ruby text, Footbag Freaks, Internet Explorer, Tools Window (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Finally, a book that explains CSS in a way that I can understand it. Explanations are clear and concise." -- Denis Forcier, May 2003

"This is the easiest to understand, most practical book on CSS design I have found yet." -- Rachel Maxim, May 2003

Product Description

Dan Shafer’s book is the definitive guide to learning and applying the principles of CSS to your Website.

This book will teach you how to…

- Appreciate why maintaining tables is a nightmare and how CSS can help
- Understand when to use CSS and when not to use CSS
- Design using CSS Positioning and multi-column page layouts
- Use the different types of CSS rules
- Reap the benefits of inheritance in CSS
- Style text and other content using CSS
- Make the most of other non-obvious uses of CSS
- Use CSS to achieve maximum Web Accessibility
- Design sites that are standards compliant
- Accommodate older Browsers

And much more...

Plus, it also comes with a practical three-column sample Website that utilizes CSS and a FREE download of the site and all of its code.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: SitePoint Pty Ltd (May 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0957921829
• ISBN-13: 978-0957921825
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #602,214 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

94 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars High Expectations, Disappointing Delivery, November 21, 2003

By	The Night Reader - See all my reviews

The title of this book - 'Designing Without Tables Using CSS' - led me to believe that I'd found a tutorial to teach me how to develop a Web site using CSS for layout. The subtitle further stoked my enthusiasm: 'A Practical Step-by-Step Guide'.

Boy, was I disappointed...

The second half of the book is a property reference undoubtedly culled from various online sources. The first 100 pages of the book trundles through the obligatory, tiresome overview of CSS that really has no place here. The rest of the book does focus on building a table-less site, but the author has not logically arranged his material and instead of delivering an annotated tutorial wanders hither and yon, discussing topics that sometimes pertain to the site he is trying build, and sometimes not. It seems that the author couldn't make up his mind, on a page-by-page basis, whether he wanted to write a CSS tutorial, overview, or reference. As a result, he failed at them all.

The quality of the writing itself isn't bad. The author has a friendly, readable style. In places, though, his pen runneth over, and a good editor could have tightened things up.

This book could have been done in half the pages if the author had focused on the tutorial and left the overview and reference for other books. A good printed tutorial on 'Designing Without Tables Using CSS' would have been invaluable. The author should have had faith in his material and written one.

At $39.99, with no Amazon discount, the book is grossly overpriced. It does have one of those nifty spines that let you lay the book flat without it closing, but there is no interior color, and both the paper and the print quality are sub-standard, leading me to believe that the book was published by a vanity press instead of a commercial printer.

You can judge the book for yourself by going to sitepoint.com and downloading the first couple of chapters. Read before you buy.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't believe the title, September 10, 2003

By A Customer

This is an okay book as an introduction to CSS and what would be possible in CSS-2. Unfortunately, support for CSS-2 is extremely limited, so you'll often read about some cool trick you could do if browsers supported it. While some people may like that, this doesn't help people who are looking to create practical web sites today, not in 2 years.

The book also barely scratches the surface of layout using CSS instead of tables. The author barely tells us how he did the sample site, and shows no other examples of this technique and variations on it, or ways around common problems. The book spends much more time on introducing all the specifics of using CSS for font properties instead of layout. The CSS-2 reference in the back may come in handy in 2 or 3 years when designers can actually use it.

The author's style is also not fun to read. He spends more time telling us what he's about to talk about than on the content itself. The book is honestly just a collection of lots of CSS stuff you could learn from plenty of free web sites, ...There's no originality here at all. Actually, if you read articles online long enough, you can learn much better stuff quicker than you could from this book.

Finally, the book costs [dollar amount] and is printed on regular stock paper in black and white. For ... more [money] you can get Eric Meyer's incredible book "Eric Meyer on CSS," printed in full color on glossy paper, showing examples much more clearly and step by step, and with lots of very practical and original advice. I got better information on CSS from one chapter in my beginning web design textbook than from this book.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The biggest problem with this book, November 25, 2003

By A Customer

This book is OK as a general CSS guide, but it fails miserably at what it was intended for- teaching you how to create a tableless CSS layout. In other words, it's outright cheating by the author, which no doubt used such a title for the book just to distinguish itself from other CSS books. The problem is, there is less than 1 chapter discussing using CSS as layout in a book that's supposed to be all about it. You can't help but feel cheated. I knew more about using CSS to replace tables going into this book than what the author taught me coming out. The one technique discussed- using absolute positioning to replace tables- is so inadequate and poorly illustrated it pushes you back into wanting to stick to using tables. Oh yes, and half of the book is a CSS reference that's there just to fill pages and make the book appear thicker than it really is. Without the reference this book becomes a booklet, just like their php/mysql book.

This is the last time I buy Sitepoint books. There's a pattern emerging here with their books- low quality print, low quality content, poor editing job, and misleading but hyped up marketing (not to mention very high prices). I'll stick with the professional publishers like O'Reilly from now on.