CSS Hacks and Filters

CSS Hacks and Filters follows, roughly, an old-to-new, simple-to-complex structure. The oldest browsers CSS designers are still struggling with are covered first, followed by more up-to-date, standards-based browsers. Internet Explorer’s proprietary conditional comment technology is important enough (given Internet Explorer’s continued prevalence and CSS bugs) to deserve a chapter by itself. In all these early chapters, I tackled real-world CSS problems and explained how the hacks covered can solve them. Later chapters explore the intersection of CSS with other Web technologies such as JavaScript, the Document Object Model (DOM), and application servers. Graphics and other visual media weigh heavily in the modern Web, and manipulating them properly with CSS is the subject of Chapter 7. Accessibility is a well-deserved hot button and techniques for applying CSS in a responsible fashion are explored in Chapter 8. The latter portion of the book is intended to offer practical examples for designers trying to put it all together—and keep it there. You’ll find separate chapters on CSS layouts, navigations systems, and debugging. My ongoing work with Dreamweaver persuaded me to present a couple of additional real-world chapters to address the use of CSS in Macromedia’s world-class and widely used authoring tool: one chapter is on core CSS use in Dreamweaver and the other concerns Dreamweaver templates and CSS. This “getting-it-done” attitude is carried over into the two appendixes. The resources listed in Appendix A should give you a full spectrum of jumpingoff places, and the tables in Appendix B are intended to help you find a safe place to land.