Web designers rejoice

As any savvy web designer knows, the best way to format a web document and certainly a website, no matter its size, is to rely on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for presentation: typeface, font size, paragraph spacing, even layout. Eric Meyer has long been my CSS inspiration with three of his books on my shelf. Recently Dan Cederholm's Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook has joined Meyer's books, stealing pride of place, in fact. Each chapter begins with a common web design task, such as styling a list, and works through the various standards-compliant solutions, presenting the pros and cons of each. The second half of the chapter focuses on invaluable tips and tricks, such as when to use the box model hack, how to stretch a column's background colour all the way to the bottom of the page, and using image replacement to spruce up text.

This book isn't for beginners. It's for web designers familiar with XHTML, CSS and web standards. If you're new to CSS and wonder what's the big deal, check out the css Zen Garden. With a simple click you can see for yourself the dramatic changes possible simply by using a different stylesheet. (The content and markup on the page does not change, only the CSS stylesheet.)