Designing without Tables

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So, how can CSS help me?

After reading ‘HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS’ you will not only understand how to use CSS to emulate old-school, table-driven web layouts, you will be creating Web sites that would be impossible to design using traditional methods

Jeffrey Zeldman
The Web Standards Project
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) deal with issues that HTML cannot handle. CSS is a powerful, flexible way to specify HTML formatting. It lets you separate the style and layout of your HTML from its content, allowing you to control the position, margins, spacing, fonts, colors, typefaces, and other aspects of a web document's elements without compromising its structure.

This completely revised and expanded second edition includes new techniques for laying out your web pages using positional CSS, and makes crafting beautiful, accessible and maintainable websites a snap. First published in 2003, the first edition was considered to be the definitive guide to CSS - a step-by-step, clearly written tutorial. The 2nd Edition revision and updates ensure it remains just as relevant to web developers today.

What will I learn?

Rachel Andrew and Dan Shafer’s book is a comprehensive guide to learning and applying the principles of CSS to your Website.

This book will teach you how to…

Appreciate why maintaining tables is a nightmare and how CSS can help
Understand when to use CSS and when not to use CSS
Build robust, flexible two- and three-column layouts using CSS positioning.
Easily build both fixed-width and liquid page layouts
Reap the benefits of inheritance in CSS
Style text and other content using CSS
Make the most of other non-obvious uses of CSS
Use CSS to achieve maximum Web Accessibility
Design sites that are standards compliant
Accommodate older Browsers
And much more...
Plus, it also comes with a sophisticated sample website styled and layed out completely with CSS and a FREE download of the site and all of its code.

And on top of this ‘HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, 2nd Edition’ also includes the most complete CSS Property Reference of any book ever written about CSS - with over 150 CSS properties described.

Check out the Table of Contents

What's new in the 2nd edition?

New information on making your site compatible with Firefox 1.5 and the upcoming Internet Explorer 7
New sections on making 1-, 2- and 3-column layouts, using both floated and absolutely positioned elements
How to create site footers below columns, and how to extend columns vertically down to the footer
Information on making your site more accessible using CSS and semantic HTML
All new sample website demonstrating the CSS techniques used in the 2nd edition
Included property reference has been updated to CSS 2.1
Corrections and clarifications throughout the book
All of the layout techniques used in the 2nd edition have been thoroughly tested in production in all of the popular modern browsers and are hack-free, so they will continue to work in Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, and beyond.