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Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design ReviewThe new release from Dan Cederholm is a great complement to his previous work in Bulletproof Web Design. For those who haven't read Bulletproof Web Design, it's premise was creating flexible websites and keeping a clear separation of your markup (HTML), styles (CSS), and behavior (JavaScript). It took examples of sites that weren't bulletproof, and showed the process to make them bulletproof. All great things. The landscape of browsers, CSS, and HTML has changed slightly since Dan wrote Bulletproof Web Design, and this book is focused on bringing those aspects to the forefront. This book assumes you have knowledge of developing with web standards, and therefore bypasses the why of adhering to web standards.
The entire book focuses on building a fictional site, the Tugboat Coffee Company. Each chapter builds a new layer into this site, with clear instruction of how each aspect progressively enhances the user experience, while not explicitly leaving other browsers in the dust. Here is a quick breakdown:
Introduction
This chapter is a quick example of why we need to be flexible with our designs and development. Using a list of menu items, Dan walks through how to best organize your markup and CSS. To me, this chapter was about first putting on your thinking cap and planning for how your sections should be organized within a site. Think about how the end user will experience and interact with your site. Even with a simple menu list, he shows how things change when text is re-sized, or simply making your clickable link area larger in a given area. While this chapter had a specific example, and code to work through--I really saw it as something to begin challenging you to think about your architecture.
Round and round we go
Most of us are familiar with the previous way of creating rounded corners, and each of those ways had their drawbacks. Using 4 images, then you had superfluous markup. Use 2 images, then it didn't scale well in both directions. This left us to educate ourselves and then choose the best decision based on our context. With CSS3 this process is made much easier. Using border-radius and it's browser specific counterparts, we can begin to work with rounded corners now--and have it work in standards aware browsers. This chapter not only discussed the organization for this in your CSS, but also some of the finer points of using rounded corners in the first place. Background clipping with images inside of a container and applying this to form elements were two specific examples.
Now, don't start throwing vegetables at me just yet. This is the beauty of this book. This is the premise of this book. The ability to use features in CSS3, while still providing an experience for all of your users. Those with advanced browsers will see everything in it's shining beauty. Those without may be missing a few things here and there. It's not all a loss--they can still access the content. In this example, your rounded corners simply may not be rounded. You have many options available to you if you wanted to do some extra work to make rounded corners in all browsers. It's all about your context and your goals. Again, going back to the first chapter--put on your thinking cap and weigh the goals and costs.
RGB eh?
Specifying colors has always been easy. You have several ways with css, including color, hex codes, and RGB. Now, we also have the ability to specify a fourth parameter to control the alpha transparency. Yes, you could achieve some of these same effects with PNG's, but that's the point--now you don't have to. This isn't just in reference to a text color or background color. This can also be applied to your borders and pseudo elements for some nice effects all around.
This chapter again builds on the example site, and shows the process for implementing this into your site right now.
But it doesn't look the same!
I have often heard this cry from many different web developers. Dan points to his wonderful site, Do Websites Need To Look The Same In Every Browser? While this may seem somewhat sarcastic (what an incredible domain name), he created this to prove his point. Even this site alone doesn't look the same in every browser--and that's OK. This chapter goes into a little more detail into the questions posed in the first chapter. We need to think about the end user experience, and let that be the driving factors into our design decisions. While these tools are great, and it's great to start experimenting with them now--they might not be right for all scenarios and contexts. To me, this chapter was a challenge. It was a challenge to be more forward thinking with the front-end architecture decisions. Thinking about the different aspects that users, analytics, and browser market share bring to this decision making.
Some techniques discussed in this chapter were text-shadow, box-shadow, and adding some smaller animations via CSS. Again, we use these things to build into the example website.
Float on
You guessed it. This section focused on managing your floats. The interesting point I found here is that Dan talks about how he has altered the way he handles them. Previously, he would clear all floated elements in the CSS file. This would create a large list that would need to be managed in the CSS. Instead, he has moved to a more preferred method of applying a .group class to the elements themselves in the markup. I think I would agree, that it works well in the markup and compounding the necessary classes together. It is much more modular, which was the point he was trying to make with this section.
The Grid
This was a chapter presented by Ethan Marcotte, and an incredible addition to this book. Ethan talks about setting up a fluid grid, and shows an array of different tricks to help you achieve this. These tricks even included image sizing, which can throw a grid off if you don't necessarily know the height dimension. He shows how to keep a larger image in context, and allowing it to scale with the design itself. He showed how to keep everything in line to a specific Grid that you choose, and how to make this flexible for the end user and their experience. It wasn't just letting things move one way or another based on the browser stretching--it was about truly adapting. Some tricks took a little JavaScript love to make them work, but it was done in a very clean manner. This was the icing on the cake to the beautiful example site that gets constructed throughout the book.
The devil is in the details
Bringing things to a close, Dan dives into some of the often forgotten smaller details of a design. It's these small details that can sometimes make or break a design. He briefly discusses fonts with @font-face linking, using jQuery for a handful of small effects and to tidy up things like .last classes in lists of items, and then an example of parallax scrolling. These little details may go un-detected to most people, but are there to help enhance the user experience. I think this chapter could have even been longer--especially with the discussion of jQuery--but I liked the examples he chose to use.
Summary
This book was a great follow up to Bulletproof Web Design. It wasn't merely a replacement or update of the book--but an extension. This book wasn't about all of the small details. It was about an introduction to some of the tools you can start using today. When I finished the book, I was inspired to simply learn more and play with the techniques discussed. If you want to see--in action--how you can begin to use new techniques while still maintaining an experience for all browsers, then this is a great book for you.
Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design OverviewThere's a real connection between craftsmanship and Web design. That's the theme running through Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design, by bestselling author Dan Cederholm, with a chapter contributed by renowned Web designer and developer Ethan Marcotte. This book explores CSS3 that works in today's browsers, and you'll be convinced that now's the time to start experimenting with it. Whether you're a Web designer, project manager, or a graphic designer wanting to learn more about the fluidity that's required when designing for the Web, you'll discover the tools to create the most flexible, reliable, and bulletproof Web designs. And you'll finally be able to persuade your clients to adopt innovative and effective techniques that make everyone's life easier while improving the end user's experience. This book's seven chapters deconstruct various aspects of a case-study Web site for the Tugboat Coffee Company, focusing on aspects that make it bulletproof and demonstrate progressive enrichment techniques over more traditional labor-intensive methods. Subjects covered in this book include:
building for unanticipated future use
progressively enriching designs using CSS3 properties
using RGBA color for transparency with an alpha channel
modular float management
crafting flexible frameworks
fluid layouts using grid-based design principles
craftsmanship details on typography, jQuery, and shifting backgrounds
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