Just picked this book up from Barnes and Noble.

HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS
By Rachel Andrew and Dan Shafer

anyone use this book before? flipped through it at the bookstore and it seems to be exactly what i've been looking for to break me out of my table design habits. Any other really good CSS books you guys would recommend?

5/17/2007 4:05:59 PM

http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/

Bookmark that site.

5/17/2007 4:17:42 PM

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/index.html

Bookmark that site.

5/17/2007 4:55:16 PM

yay divs

5/17/2007 8:00:44 PM

^^ did anyone else see "www.assplay.co.uk" when they read that?

in response to the OP, I'd recommend "Zen and the Art of CSS" and also "The Art & Science of CSS"

[Edited on May 17, 2007 at 8:12 PM. Reason : ]

5/17/2007 8:11:46 PM

It's not worth it.

5/17/2007 9:04:06 PM

^?

5/17/2007 11:02:03 PM

^ Css is great but to be honest until support is better there are a lot of things I'll continue to put into tables beyond data.

5/18/2007 1:30:12 AM

no i saw "cosplay" - isnt that the freaky stuff where people dress up as animals?

5/18/2007 3:29:16 AM

No that's furry's. Cosplay is where you dress up as fantasy figures and go to war or play pretend. Furry's dress up like animals.

I only know this because I nick used to be RaigeDaFurry and people kept thinking I was a god damn furry so I cut the last part off.

5/18/2007 10:19:25 AM

nearly anything you can do with a tables you can do with divs

they both have their pluses and minuses about them though

5/18/2007 11:05:13 AM

^what are some of the pluses and minus? i've been using tables for layout design and the code usuall gets really lengthy and confusing without comments. Also I have found it doesn't always work the way I indented with different browsers. also, i figure it would require less code if I hvae one external style sheet with the layout definitions thats being used through out every page on the site. So i don't have to have repeated code etc. Oh and browser compatibility, again, is my main reason for wanting to learn more CSS. Plus i've seen some really cool things done with CSS. such as accordion navigation, tabbed navigation etc.

5/18/2007 11:45:18 AM

ditto BigMan157. it kind of depends on what you want to do exactly. personnally i like to use tables for very specific, even alignment of items, whereas divs are better for exact placements IMO. tables have a slightly understood structure, divs do not (at least relatively). also, remember that you can add class/id to any element of a table just like a div (for the external stylesheets you want to do) except there are some things you have to pay attention to because of how tables work. the switch to divs is a good move, but it can be frustrating.

5/18/2007 11:54:59 AM

tables it's easier to get a basic layout with cross-browser compatibility, multiple (>3) columns, indentations, etc. - plus it's a lot more straightforward

using CSS allows for a lot more flexibility, like if you were making themes for a site (e.g. http://www.csszengarden.com/ uses the same html for all the designs on there changes the stylesheet) or wanted to do the reactive menus without using JS or Flash, but is somewhat more complicated

5/18/2007 12:02:10 PM

it was my understanding that using CSS and divs provided better browser compatibility?

5/18/2007 12:16:37 PM

not especially

IE still renders differently that Gecko-based browsers (FF) no matter if you are using tables or divs or what have you

CSS has some ways around it, but they are sorta iffy

CSS menus will be better over JS menus though

5/18/2007 12:25:14 PM

^It's getting much much better.

Most alignment issues now stem from improper nesting or selector usage. It's been really tough for me as browsers have become more and more standard compliant, because I have so many old tricks to get everything to work.

Right now Firefox, Opera and IE7 play pretty well together, IE6 has a few known quirks (most of which can be avoided by declaring a strict xhtml doctype), Firefox and Safari on OSX have their own little display issues.

CSS and div's provide better data compatibility.

Quote :

"i like to use tables for very specific, even alignment of items, whereas divs are better for exact placements IMO. tables have a slightly understood structure, divs do not (at least relatively). also, remember that you can add class/id to any element of a table just like a div (for the external stylesheets you want to do) except there are some things you have to pay attention to because of how tables work. the switch to divs is a good move, but it can be frustrating."

You can do very specific, even alignment of items with normal HTML tags and relative positioned styles (which is what you should do actually).

I think div's have a very understood structure, provided you organize your page well. Much moreso than tables most of the time, especially when looking at the code.

And adding classes/id's to table elements is treading on dangerous ground. A lot of style elements do not work in tables, or specifically in row or cell tags. And it can get very confusing and your styles can get very longwinded trying to tailor cells with stylesheets.

5/18/2007 12:40:49 PM

apart from those websites listed above. What are some really good books to get? Books i've used to start from scratch, back when i learned ASP, ASP.net, PHP etc...that I really liked were the "learn ____ in 21 days/24 hours" and then buying reference books or "Bibles"

Are there any lesson structured books out there for CSS that you guys like? Been through amazon.com reading reviews and stuff but those are hardly ever useful lol.

5/18/2007 12:48:54 PM

I just read "Transcending CSS" by Andy Clarke. It was more theoretical, but was a good foundation before reading:

CSS The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland. This book is much more practical with examples (and code you can download and play with). This book is more useful than the first as far as learning how to actually get things done. Like I said though, the first book provided some good theory on WHY you should do things a certain way.

Don't overlook accessibility benefits of using CSS over tables. Transcending CSS teaches you to consider looking at the page as a screen reader would, and organizing the HTML to make the most sense that way. Search spiders like this too.

I bought both books from Amazon.

5/18/2007 6:44:11 PM