What do you think?
Rate this book
HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS
HTML Designing Without Tables Using CSS , 2nd Edition is for web developers looking to create websites using Cascading Style Sheets for layout, which allow for faster page downloads, easier maintenance, faster website redesigns, and better search engine optimization. HTML Utopia covers all aspects of using Cascading Style Sheets in Web Development, and is a must-read for Web Developers designing new sites or upgrading existing ones to use CSS layouts. This book includes one of the most comprehensive CSS2 references on the market. Jeffrey Zeldman, web design guru and co-founder of the Web Standards Project, says "After reading this book, you will not only understand how to use CSS to emulate old-school, table-driven web layouts, you will be creating websites that would be impossible to design using traditional methods". The second edition of this popular book includes brand new coverage of Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 1.1, new CSS Solutions, and greatly expanded coverage of popular, cross-browser, CSS layout techniques. From The Back Cover
"Now You Too Can Easily Create Modern 'Table-free' Websites Using CSS from scratch" 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
"Now You Too Can Easily Create Modern 'Table-free' Websites Using CSS from scratch" 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
520 pages, Paperback
First published April 14, 2006
2 people are currently reading
39 people want to read
About the author
Rachel Andrew
53 books13 followersRachel Andrew is a British web developer, author and speaker. She is an Invited Expert to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) CSS Working Group, Google Developer Expert, and a former member of the Web Standards Project. She is the editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 25, 2010
Well I picked up this book and thought It will be about layouts with CSS mainly. I was wrong; It goes through a long introduction about CSS basics. It's useful and contain a comprehensive rich appendix worth to check! Found some of the properties I never heard of before. It also explain the inheritance and the selectors clearly. Recommended for anyone with basic knowledge looking to take his skills a smaller step forward before digging into the hardcore CSS
August 4, 2020
basic and clear.
February 14, 2014
I bought this book some time ago, and just finally got around to reading it in its entirety.
When it was published, this book would have been very good. That was a time (2006) when CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) was just starting to become important in the creation of web sites, and many web developers were used to using plain old HTML tables for their web page layouts. For many reasons, CSS is a far superior way to go, but back then it was taking a while to catch on. So, the focus of this book -- Designing Without Tables Using CSS -- was very relevant, and there were precious few books that covered CSS in this fashion (and they were needed!)
This book was the 2nd Edition, and unfortunately there don't seem to be any more recent editions. That's a shame, because the book was very useful indeed, but desperately needs updating. HTML5, CSS3, and many other important technologies have come along in the intervening years (JQuery, as well), and many topics in the book have become out of date. There are lots of references to Internet Explorer 6, and Netscape 4, both of which have, we can only hope, gone away long ago, since they were terribly non-standard and buggy. A whole cottage industry was spawned by these browsers of people who came up with various "hacks" to overcome buggy behavior, especially in IE 6.
My guess is that this book hasn't been updated to later editions because, nowadays, web developers use CSS all the time, in the ways that this book describes. In other words, the reason for the book's existence might have been seen to have gone away. I disagree, because there are always web developer newbies coming along who need to learn "the proper way to do things" (whether they like it or not!). There are too many books that emphasize "Tricks and Tips", encouraging people to just cut and paste stuff without understanding it. (That's one sad part of our current culture, in general: Don't bother learning things properly, because it takes too long, and we have to get the product out the door/project finished and don't have time for "theoretical stuff". Sigh...)
If this book were updated to a new, modern edition, I'd likely give it a much higher star rating. It's still a very useful book, as long as you know that there are more modern things to learn that replace some sections and add to them. I'm not sure what CSS book might be a better choice today -- it would talk about both HTML5 and CSS3, plus JavaScript, including major JavaScript libraries such as JQuery. The problem is that describing all of that is a pretty major task, and there might not be enough readers willing to spend the time and effort learning how all these technologies interact, and how best to use them.
When it was published, this book would have been very good. That was a time (2006) when CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) was just starting to become important in the creation of web sites, and many web developers were used to using plain old HTML tables for their web page layouts. For many reasons, CSS is a far superior way to go, but back then it was taking a while to catch on. So, the focus of this book -- Designing Without Tables Using CSS -- was very relevant, and there were precious few books that covered CSS in this fashion (and they were needed!)
This book was the 2nd Edition, and unfortunately there don't seem to be any more recent editions. That's a shame, because the book was very useful indeed, but desperately needs updating. HTML5, CSS3, and many other important technologies have come along in the intervening years (JQuery, as well), and many topics in the book have become out of date. There are lots of references to Internet Explorer 6, and Netscape 4, both of which have, we can only hope, gone away long ago, since they were terribly non-standard and buggy. A whole cottage industry was spawned by these browsers of people who came up with various "hacks" to overcome buggy behavior, especially in IE 6.
My guess is that this book hasn't been updated to later editions because, nowadays, web developers use CSS all the time, in the ways that this book describes. In other words, the reason for the book's existence might have been seen to have gone away. I disagree, because there are always web developer newbies coming along who need to learn "the proper way to do things" (whether they like it or not!). There are too many books that emphasize "Tricks and Tips", encouraging people to just cut and paste stuff without understanding it. (That's one sad part of our current culture, in general: Don't bother learning things properly, because it takes too long, and we have to get the product out the door/project finished and don't have time for "theoretical stuff". Sigh...)
If this book were updated to a new, modern edition, I'd likely give it a much higher star rating. It's still a very useful book, as long as you know that there are more modern things to learn that replace some sections and add to them. I'm not sure what CSS book might be a better choice today -- it would talk about both HTML5 and CSS3, plus JavaScript, including major JavaScript libraries such as JQuery. The problem is that describing all of that is a pretty major task, and there might not be enough readers willing to spend the time and effort learning how all these technologies interact, and how best to use them.
August 11, 2016
I had high hopes for this book. After finishing Eric Meyer's latest CSS book, I was ready for something completely dedicated to teaching me everything I needed to know about creating a site without using a single table tag for layout. Although the book does explain how to do this, I was still disappointed. After a brief introduction about CSS (yet again), section two of the book explains how to create layouts without using tables. In all, seventy pages of 500 are centered on this topic. Half the book is a CSS reference. The other sections talk about fonts, colors, etc. Clearly, the book is mis-titled. This remains a good book for someone new to CSS, so they can avoid bad habits from the start. However, I would recommend Eric Meyer's book for advanced CSS users.
July 13, 2008
This book is good for anyone who would like to learn to design a website. It shows numerous ways to style your layout with CSS.
I would recommend it to any designer that already knows web as a reference book. I have not been able to get myself to read the rest of the book, since I know most of it all ready, but I do use it as a reference when I get stumped with Internet Explorer.
I would recommend it to any designer that already knows web as a reference book. I have not been able to get myself to read the rest of the book, since I know most of it all ready, but I do use it as a reference when I get stumped with Internet Explorer.
December 22, 2007
I read this book thinking I knew a good deal about CSS. I quickly discovered that I was wrong. I was able to design a site with no tables whatsoever using this book, and started learning the fine art of content separated from style.
December 21, 2008
CSS. Don't be a web poser, be an auteur.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews