OptimWise - Web Design & Development Simpsonville/Greenville SC

CSS: The Definitive Guide by Eric A. Meyer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Definitive Guide” is a fairly accurate title for this 3rd edition of Eric Meyer's CSS textbook; it’s a deep dive of sometimes eye-glazing detail. It’s quite technical in its explanations of the math and calculations that CSS performs. There are CSS snippets and screenshots of the results, but it’d be better if they were in color. The book was published in 2006 so it’s missing CSS3, but given the widespread use of CSS 2.1, the book is still relevant. My favorite topics were floating and positioning, generated content, pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements.

Types of positioning

• Relative: element’s box is offset by some distance. Element retains its shape, and space it would have occupied is preserved.
• Absolute: element’s box is removed from flow and positioned with respect to its containing block (nearest block-level ancestor box). The space it would have occupied is closed, as though the element didn’t exist. The positioned element generates a block-level box.
• Fixed: element’s box behaves as though set to absolute, but its containing block is the viewport.

Display: none vs. Visibility: hidden

display: none renders the element invisible, and it doesn’t take up the space it would ordinarily. visibility: hidden renders the element invisible, but it takes up the space it would ordinarily.