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CSS Web Design For Dummies Review by Patrick S. Conwell
Okay information, bad implementation
The author focuses almost entirely on Internet Explorer, and isn't shy about it. He plainly states "history and popular opinion has elected Internet Explorer (IE) as the standard -- who are we to argue?" and then goes on to say "assume that your Web page visitors are either using IE, or are accustomed to the penalties for sticking with a fringe browser".
I can understand his logic in focusing on IE, but I don't think it's fair to us 'fringe' users who use a browser that actually follows the W3C standards. In my opinion, we *should* argue against bad and/or non-compliant browsers.
There is a good chance my website is vastly different from the 'average' website, so I don't present this as conclusive proof, but only 33% of my visitors are using IE while 41% use firefox and 26% use Safari. Thats a far cry from 90% IE (as the author claims).
If people keep supporting Microsoft's bad programing, Microsoft will keep writing programs that are not to standard and this book does little but promote Microsoft's bad programing. Further more, I suspect that in the not-so-distant future, we will see a shift towards firefox or some other compliant browser and most of the information in this book will become null and void.
Case in point, the very first example in the book will not work in Firefox. What's going to happen when IE8 or 10 or whatever comes along and Microsoft jumps on the W3C band wagon? All the pages written for IE will now be broken.
Additionally, even if most browsers are IE for now, I would be willing to put money on that most developers are running some flavor of Linux (as I am), and it would be nice to get generic information instead of Microsoft specific information. For example, instead of just saying 'save the file then open it in your browser', the author says 'In notebook, select file, then save, and then open the file in Internet Explorer'.
He really goes out of his way to dumb it down to the masses. Sure, the author may use language my mother can follow, but my mother doesn't even know what CSS is. It would be nice to have more generic information, even if it sacrifices a bit of clarity.
All-in-all, the book is a good starting point, but I would be hesitant to recommend this book to anyone, and I definitely would not recommend it to anyone that uses Linux or Mac or anything that is not Windows.