“More and more people are using style sheets. Their biggest
advantage? You can have one style sheet and use that throughout
your entire site. When you’d like to change the way, for instance,
your <H1> tags look, you’ll only need to change the style
sheet, which obviously saves you a lot of work. Also, style sheets
seperate the content (for which HTML was invented) from the layout
(for which HTML, contrary to popular believe, was not
invented).”
“Okay, let’s discuss the book. It is called ‘the definitive
guide’ and I must say this book comes very close to that. The first
9 chapters take a close look at CSS1 (version one of the style
sheet specification, it’s an official standard). These chapters are
very well suited to just read from beginning to end. They explain
all there is to style sheets, in a very practical way. They author
has done extensive testing using various platforms (Netscape,
Internet Explorer, Opera, on Windows, UNIX and Mac) and will give
useful tips to prevent your HTML from looking awful on a browser
that parses style sheets incorreclty. Yes, although all current
graphical browsers understand style sheets version 1, not all of
them will display all properties like they should. It appears that
Opera is the best of the three, Netscape the worst. The author uses
many examples to show how the various properties affect the way the
HTML is displayed, thus making it much more easy to understand what
is going on – a picture says more than 1000 words.”
“To summarize: this is a must-read for web designers, and
not even only those using style sheets. Designers not yet using
style sheets will surely start using them after reading this
comprehensive book, which can both be used to make yourself
acquanted to style sheets as well as a reference.”