anyone know CSS?

[robin]

i am trying to teach myself but hell its annoying lol

 

[o0 Ryan 0o]

I know CSS like the back of my hand. However, designing strictly with CSS and XHTML, I'm still learning the standards. HTML is sort of going out the window.

 

[robin]

yeah it is. CSS seems to be the new thing as far as design and layout and layout and whatnot. you can do some very cool stuff but hell its hard learning from scratch lol

 

[o0 Ryan 0o]

Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at. It's really clever how you can nest div's like an HTML table structure. I've learned how to do pretty much everything, I just need to get into a tedious groove. I'm so used to coding HTML, and it's hard to break yourself of it. My biggest concern with CSS design is compatibility. You can have some issues cross browser and platform. I've had pretty good luck with IE, Opera, and Mozilla as well as Safari and IE on my Mac. Everything works pretty straight forward, but each browser has their little interpretation differences. It bugs the crap out of me when things aren't consistent. I really want to start following the new web standards, but I'm not sure that everyone and every computer is 100% ready. It's still sort of hit or miss, and I'm a big fan of compatibility for everyone.

 

[robin]

i completely understand. some things seem to show fine for mozilla (firefox) but not in IE... seems you have to tweak them just right to get things to work. eh i guess give it time

 

[Sandra]

I also know some CSS and use it a lot, but mostly to give format to tables, text, images, links, etc. I still do the main structure with HTML tables. I would love to learn CSS structuring when I have some free time, but I find the same problem as you (compatibility)... It's horrible when you can't get the results in different browsers to match.

 

[paulnattress]

Ah! This is what I do for a living.

The following book is meant to be very good at teaching you how to build websites using CSS, XHTML and web standards: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/html1/

 

[robin]

i wish i was able to see well enough to read books so i have to just teach myself by looking at examples and doing it. it's much harder my way lol

 

[paulnattress]

Learning by looking at examples is not a bad way of doing it. I know from experience though that some of the complex CSS stuff for layout is very hard to reverse engineer. Plus, half of the battle is knowing why you're coding things a certain way, which is something you can't get from looking at code.

I haven't the book I mentioned but I own several other books by Sitepoint and find them very accessible and practical. One of the guys at Sitepoint (ok, he may be biased but they'rea good honest bunch over there) said he gave a copy of the book to his non-techy wife and she was a making standards compliant, CSS-based site in a short time (a week or maybe two weeks, I can't remember which).

 

[Milwaukee Reptiles]

I know a book I used (granted, this was a good 2-3 years ago) was 'Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook (Pioneering Series)'. I seem to remember it being all CSS1 (it was 2004), but I found it tremendously helpful when learning. Had lots of code examples with explanations of why it worked. Come to think of it, I think it was actually recommended by the guys at sitepoint at the time, so that may be the place to find out if there's newer or better books since.

 

[paulnattress]

The author of that one (Dan Cedarholm) really does know his stuff.

 

[robin]

Learning by looking at examples is not a bad way of doing it. I know from experience though that some of the complex CSS stuff for layout is very hard to reverse engineer. Plus, half of the battle is knowing why you're coding things a certain way, which is something you can't get from looking at code.

I haven't the book I mentioned but I own several other books by Sitepoint and find them very accessible and practical. One of the guys at Sitepoint (ok, he may be biased but they'rea good honest bunch over there) said he gave a copy of the book to his non-techy wife and she was a making standards compliant, CSS-based site in a short time (a week or maybe two weeks, I can't remember which).

i completely understand this but i am actually unable to visually see the type in most books. it's not that i don't want to it's that i can't see it to read it

 

[paulnattress]

Ah, ok, I understand now. Here's some web-based resources that may help you:

http://www.westciv.com/style_master/house/index.html - a list of resources to help learn web standards and CSS.

This one may be a bit overwhelming but it's a list of CSS web developers' favourite sites for CSS: http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2004/06/21/bonanza.html#entry-more. A lot of these are links to blogs with commentary/thought on CSS rather than tutorials although there's tutorial links in there I'm sure.

I'll ask my team of developers for more links for you.

 

[paulnattress]

Actually, try contacting the guys at Sitepoint and tell them that you can't read the printed book and see if they'll sell you a PDF version (assuming you're ok with PDFs). They're a fairly small company with some good people running it so they may do it as a one-off request.

 

[robin]

yeah that would be great

 

[paulnattress]

One of my guys came back with this list:

General

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/alaprimer

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/alaprimer2

http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/



Web Standards

http://www.456bereastreet.com/lab/developing_with_web_standards/

http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/workshop/

http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/checklist.htm



CSS

http://spellbook.infinitiv.it/2006/09/03/css-best-articles.htm

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2006/10/25/css-techniques-tutorials-layouts/

 

[robin]

awesome thanks