Recommended Reading:
Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide (Voices That Matter)
A great book that explains how to set up web pages that do not use tables for layout. It explains how to use the DIV tag and CSS to structure complex web page layouts and how to use CSS for the design of your site.
Seperating the design of your site from your actual content is important for a number of reasons including:
1. Your site is likely to perform better in search engines - tables add a lot of clutter to your web code
2. Storing the design of your site seperately makes it far easier to control your site - a change to a global CSS file can update your whole site at once rather than having to edit each page
3. CSS gives you far great control of your overall site and can ensure consistency
4. Tables are not great for web accessibility - sites written in HTML 4.01 or XHTML that seperate design from content are far better handled.
Who is this book for?
This book is aimed at people with a basic understanding of HTML. It is clearly written and has great examples to follow and doesn't rapidly descend into jargon! It also covers a lot of the cross browser issues that you are likely to come across! It's particularly helpful if you have written web pages in the past using tables for layout and want to move to DIV / CSS layouts and build drop down menus with CSS etc.
Contents
1. XHTML - Giving Structure to Content
2. How CSS Works
3. Styling Fonts and Text
4. Positioning Elements
5. Basic Page Layout
6. Designing Interface Components
7. Building Web Pages
