In this chapter, the authors finally roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. Here, parsing order is addressed, specificity, inheritance, and the actual “Cascade” that makes up the “Cascading Style Sheets” acronym. Not to mention layering. And that’s all inside of This is Cereal.
Having been a coder in the past – forced to learn machine language on Sun SparcStations, machines that are designed so that you don’t ever have to use machine language, I might add – this chapter was kind of a breeze. These sort of tricks have been long needed, and widely-used, by previous scripting languages. JavaScript, for example, used to perform the duty of detecting which browser was being used, and would feed the proper page to the proper browser. Germination uses Internet Explorer’s lack of CSS standard compliance to feed it a completely different design than other browsers.
Of course, once IE7 comes out – standard compliant AND tabbed browsing? Trying to be Firefox much? – it may pick up the proper page, and half of this design’s code might become out-dated. But then, that’s what future-proof design is all about. The page will still work.
Bonsai Sky is SLICK. All of its tips and tricks simply don’t show up in older browsers, but the design is solid without the bells and whistles. This one is a masterpiece. It really ties it all together. Graphics, layout, special effects, browser compatibility… I’d really like to shake Mike Davidson’s hand.
Tulipe has HORIZONTAL SCROLLING! Argh. *Shakes fist at the heavens.* The design is extremely pretty, and includes nifty tricks, but it tweaks that horizontal scrolling pet peeve, so I won’t say a word more. Heh.
Door to my Garden does absolute width the way it should be done. I know the chapter is all about backgrounds, and how to deal with background tiling, positioning them with ultimate control, and keeping your style simple, but the positioning in this design is what caught my eye right off the bat.
Somebody actually named their design Elastic Lawn? Uh, okay. The name aside, this is what I was talking about before with combining absolute positioning and liquid positioning to get the best of both worlds. The chapter also focuses a bit on the way repetition was smoothed out with graphics and such, and that’s cool, but once again I dig the layout work with the positioning.
Okay, that’s enough blathering from me.