CSS Hacks and Filters: Making Cascading Stylesheets Work by Joseph W. Lowery

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
CSS works better than it once did but not nearly as well as it should. Even today’s best new browsers have CSS quirks, and when you think about all those versions of IE and Netscape 4 still floating around... But clients don’t care about your problems. They just want their sites to look right. So you’ve got to hack and tweak. So you need Joe Lowery’s CSS Hacks and Filters.

Lowery starts with the notorious Netscape 4. You’ll learn how to give Netscape its own weird stylesheet or (if that’s too painful) hide individual CSS rules from it. Lowery offers specific fixes for Netscape’s non-standard handling of fonts, margins, borders, backgrounds, lists, and tables. After offering comparable tips for IE 3/4, he turns to hiding CSS selectively from newer browsers. For instance, despite IE5/Mac’s relative quality, it too has issues. Lowery offers four widely used solutions: the @media, Mac Band Pass, Commented Backslash, and Tan hacks.

You’ll learn to use IE Conditional Comments, the closest thing to an “authorized” CSS hack. Lowery shows how to write JavaScript and DOM hacks (for instance, to control the behavior of div tags). There’s also a quick look at coding server side solutions (with examples for ASP, PHP, and ColdFusion).

Lowery’s solutions range from accessibility to navigation, graphics to media. He even provides several CSS layouts that have been pre-hacked for you. Dreamweaver users will especially appreciate his two Dreamweaver-specific chapters, including coverage of integrating CSS hacks into templates.

In a perfect, 100 percent web standards–compliant world, you wouldn’t need this stuff. Here on earth, you do. Bill Camarda, from the August 2005 Read Only

From the Publisher

• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a method of describing how a Web page should look in a Web browser, but a growing number of browsers do not support CSS in the same way, forcing developers to constantly play catch-up to keep their sites consistent
• Bestselling author Joe Lowery eases the pain for those Web developers who aren't feeling the CSS love-he guides readers through real-world workarounds that will help a CSS-based site look and work the way it was meant to
• Readers will grit their teeth, clench their fists, and roll their eyes for the last time once they learn how to craft fluid multi-column layouts, build interactive navigation, fix the Box Model, implement CSS hacks in Dreamweaver, and more cool tricks

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents