I just received my copy of Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design, by Andy Clarke, and after a half hour of browsing through it I’m already super-impressed with several aspects.
First of all it’s a drop dead gorgeous book! Everything about this pulls me further into it, from the front cover to the beautiful interior layout to the lush feel of the pages. Superb!
Secondly, I like the precept of designing for today’s modern browsers and not for yesterday’s antiques. What I mean by that is that it is refreshing to see someone advocate design that utilizes the strides browsers have made since NN 4. Typically it has been advised to ”dumb down” for older browsers and I can’t tell you how that annoyed me. I don’t believe that design should primarily accommodate ancient technology (NN 4 is, by Internet standards, ancient).
By the same token I realize that we still must accommodate and ensure that what we do will either degrade gracefully or will have its own styled design suited to the lesser abilities. You can as Clarke writes in his book, “design for the most modern browsers using the latest coding techniques but you still provide a good experience for people who use outdated browsers.” Letting a client know that this is the way you work should alleviate their concerns and may well be something they are pleased to hear.
Mr. Clarke also acknowledges that CSS has a learning curve and it’s not an easy language for designers to embrace. His reasoning is that CSS was developed by technicals rather than designers, and be that as it may, I know many webmasters who are either suspicious of or reluctant to use CSS because it’s not as “easy or consistent” as tables. They are right, to some degree but I view their arguments in the same light as I would a painter who resists using a new brush because the sponges are more familiar. That doesn’t mean the sponges are the best tool for the art.
Once webmaster couldn’t get the CSS pages, from a Dreamweaver template, to behave in IE7 and converted everything to tables so it would play nice. Tables are excellent for tabular data. Tables are not excellent for layout. They present their own difficulties and require certain practices that CSS will not.
I’ve been such a fan of CSS from the moment I first discovered how much it frees me up as a web designer to engage in design and it’s wonderful to know that another voice is echoing similar sentiments. One of my favorite online haunts is the CSS Zengarden and this book seems to offer the next steps.
