CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, by Andy Budd is a great introduction to coding “POSH” standards based websites. This book covers all the basics and some more advanced techniques in how to use CSS effectively. It also educates the read on some key pitfalls that you will run into with various browsers.

At a Glance
This book covers:

• foundations
• understand the basic visual formating model
• background images and image replacement
• styling links
• styling list and creating nav bars
• styling forms and data tables
• layout
• hacks and filters
• bugs and bug fixing
• and 2 case studies to learn from

My Thoughts
I really enjoyed this book and use this book on a regular basis. I think this book is more geared for the designer and should be in the bookself of any modern web designer. It is an easy read and the case studies are very useful. While this book doesn’t go into super detail on everything it does cover all the bases and is a good primer for learning about CSS.

Rating
I rate this book 5 of 5

This is another interesting implementation of flash that is similar to SIFR (flash based text replacement). It allow the designer to implement and combine a small group of image filters such as rounded corners, borders, drop shadow as well as allowing users to scale images within an elastic image. It does all of this in a light weight script that degrades gracefully.

I really like to see these unconventional ways of using flash. It really gives flash a new life even with web standards based designers and search engine optimizers alike. Flash does not have to be a resource hog that takes forever to download and can really bring some extra punch to your design.

Another great use for this is with in a content management application so that you could use CSS and SWFIR to dynamically alter all images with a give tag very quickly and unobtrusively to the editor.

Over all I really like this application. I think that this is a great addition to any web designers arsenal .

You have probably heard the terms CSS, Cascading Style Sheet, web standards, accessability thrown around by designers and developers alike, so what does it all mean. I thought that I would write up a quick cheat sheet to get you initiated into the world of semantic based markup.

First lets learn some of the terms what they are about and why you should be using them. First on the list CSS also known as “cascading style sheet”. Wikipedia defines CSS as:

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

so why do we want to use it. well what css is great for is separating design from content. This serves many functions from a design aspect it allows the designer much more control over the layout. Also it allows the code to remain clear of layout and design based markup. All design and layout based markup is stored in a CSS file and is linked to on the pages that want to use this stylesheet. This allows the designer to completely control the look and feel of all linked pages from one location.

Another reason why web owners should be pushing the designer to code using web standards is that since all of the design and layout markup is stored off in a separate file and is only has to load once the over all time it takes a user to load the page is decreased. Search engines also prefer css based websites marked up with semantic code because it makes it easier to determine what is important on your site.