NYPL Style Guide

CSS: Style Sheet Guidelines (3)

 

The NYPL Style Guide cannot possibly teach you all there is to know about CSS. But the following resources will get you up to speed:

  1. Online Guides & Articles
  2. Online Tools & Advanced Information
  3. Recommended Books
 

Online Guides & Articles

CSS Guide
John Allsopp’s complete online tutorial
Fear of Style Sheets
A gentle introduction from alistapart.com, plus tips on “no-fault CSS” to accommodate bad browsers (1998-1999)
Fear of Style Sheets 4
From alistapart.com, showing how type sizes fail in CSS and explaining why CSS pixels are the only sure means of controlling type size on the web; however, since CSS pixels can create an accessibility hazard ...
Size Matters
... Todd Fahrner, an invited expert to the W3C’s CSS Working Group, shows how to work around font–size keyword implementation flaws in Netscape 4 and IE4/5 (Win) to control type sizes while maintaining accessibility (from alistapart.com)
Little Boxes
Owen Briggs’s clickable CSS layouts (Open Source)
A Web Designer's Journey
From alistapart.com: showing how to design sites exclusively in CSS, work with the CSS box model, and use different types of links to turn off CSS in bad browsers
Practical CSS Layout Tips, Tricks, & Techniques
From alistapart.com: Mark Newhouse shows more ways to use CSS to replace (X)HTML tables
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Online Tools & Advanced Information

CSS Validator
Check your Style Sheet for errors
1-click validators
One–click validation "bookmarklets" from David Lindquist
Favelets
Advanced CSS "bookmarklets" (IE only)
Web Review Master Compatibility Chart
More than you ever wanted to know about poor CSS support in browsers, compiled by Eric Meyer
SelectORacle
English translations of CSS–2 selectors (advanced)
Box Model Hack
Working around the flaws in IE5/Windows’s CSS Box Model (advanced)
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Books

Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web
by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos (Addison-Wesley: 1997)
Though hardly recent (1997), this book has the advantage of having been written by world-class experts. Lie and Bos are W3C members, and Lie is widely considered “the father of CSS.”
Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide
by Eric Meyer (O'Reilly: 2001)
Eric Meyer is a world expert on CSS, an invited expert to the W3C's CSS Working Group, and currently serves as the Web standards evangelist for Netscape Communications (which is one reason Netscape 6.01 is so much better than Netscape 6.0). His book is both advanced and comprehensive.
Taking Your Talent to the Web
by Jeffrey Zeldman (New Riders: 2001)
Zeldman is a web designer, CSS advocate, and group leader of The Web Standards Project. His book is written for graphic designers and intermediate developers, and its chapter on CSS clarifies many issues while helping you avoid the snares of bad browsers. Disclosure: Zeldman helped prepare this Style Guide.
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The next section presents Style Sheets for your use on NYPL projects. »

« CSS Section Index | Steal These Style Sheets! »