Cheesy Quintessence

I got HTML Utopia on July 30th and have read all 12 chapters already. I must say that the book is not quite what I had expected. Considering that the focus of the book was designing a web site without tables using CSS, I would have expected much more focus on positioning techiques, the most troublesome part of designing a layout exclusively with CSS, than this book offers. Instead, the book barely touched that subject, making it quite a disappointment to me…

HTML Utopia seems to treat Internet Explorer 6 as a modern browser, according to the table of CSS support by browser generations presented in one of the early chapters. A modern browser, according to the book, supports CSS2 very well or perfectly. Obviously, Internet Explorer can’t be put in that category by any stretch of the imagination.

I was hoping that HTML Utopia would place a strong focus on CSS positioning and how to get it functioning properly in Internet Explorer. Instead, the look at positioning techniques was very far out. Initially, the book explained a method of making a multiple column layout using CSS, absolute positioning, leaving a severe problem with overlaps. This problem was later resolved by either using a JavaScript (which I consider to be unacceptable), or by using CSS floats (which I understood very well already). The example site, Footbag Freaks, uses absolute positioning and, as such, is afflicted with the rendering issue of overlapping content.

As the book said, using CSS floats to make a multiple column layout is not always as predictable as using absolute positioning. The most major problems with them come from Internet Explorer’s failure to properly implement the box model (I believe), which this book does not even touch on. In fact, aside from the minor issue of the DOCTYPE, HTML Utopia does not even focus on resolving rendering issues in IE at all. The last chapter has a section about supporting Netscape 4.x, which supposedly makes up about 2% of the browser population, while the much more important and more difficult to deal with problems with Internet Explorer go untouched.

HTML Utopia does a fine job at presenting useful techniques in an understandable manner, even for beginners (I would guess). As I was already rather mature in my knowledge of CSS, most of what it teaches was not new to me. The book does not dive deep enough into CSS design to be helpful for anybody of intermediate to advanced CSS knowledge. I have yet to decide whether I wish to send the book back for a refund (due to SitePoint’s 30 day money-back guarantee), as the book’s appendixes, which cover all CSS2 properties, make up nearly half of the pages in the book and are bound to be helpful.

All that aside, I do have new ideas and determination to convert all my sites to CSS layouts now. With the new approach I’ve gained from reading this book, I think I will finally be able to do it. I will just have to rely upon the Internet for solutions to any advanced problems I run into, as I should have in the first place.