Professional CSS;Foreword

 Foreword

When I met Christopher Schmitt in 1998, he was running High Five, the first online magazine dedicated

to the art of aesthetic, visually pleasing Web design. To good design, he soon added a commitment to

responsible code stewardship. Christopher was an early supporter of The Web Standards Project; in the

aftermath of the Browser Wars, he became a tireless and well-learned advocate of CSS design.

 

Books about CSS-based design are only as good as the CSS and the design they contain. Professional CSS

boasts the best of both. For this volume, Christopher Schmitt has assembled some of the most talented

and influential visual stylists and thinkers designing Web sites today. To make the cut, the designers in

this book had to know as much about semantic markup and cascading style sheets as they did about

branding, graphic design, and the softer user sciences. (If they also knew from JavaScript and your pop-

ular plug-ins, so much the better.) Oh, and they had to be lucid, passionate, entertaining writers — and

original thinkers — to boot.

 

Meeting these tough requirements was a short list of masters: Todd Dominey, Ethan Marcotte, Dunstan

Orchard, and Mark Trammell. Each has done incredible things on and for the Web, earning peer respect,

winning fame, and above all, satisfying demanding clients while delivering standards-based designs

that know everything about the user and nothing of compromise.

 

As you read this book, you will learn their secrets (including how to include Flash in a standards-based

layout without breaking document validity) and discover principles of CSS layout and semantic markup

you can put to work on your most challenging professional projects. Please enjoy responsibly.

 

Jeffrey Zeldman

Founder, Happy Cog Studios

Author, Designing with Web Standards (New Riders Press, 2003)