In the intervening time, I have been
involved in the development of numerous Web sites and have
?¬? ne-tuned the way I use CSS in the process. I intended to make
a few small adjustments to this book for the second edition to
cover IE7 and generally bring it up to date, but I ended up making
numerous improvements to the ?¬? rst three chapters and completely
rewriting the rest of the book. What should have taken weeks took
almost a year.
The changes I have made re?¬‚ ect the inevitable improvement to
the skills of anyone who works constantly with CSS, and these
changes also more deeply address two skills that all programmers
need to master: to avoid rewriting code that they have previously
written elsewhere, and to learn to write code in the most economical
way possible. Ways in which you can achieve these two worthy
goals in your own work are presented throughout this new edition
of the book.
Reuse and DRY
The ?¬? rst goal, re-use of code, is a theme that I explore in several
chapters. I show techniques that let me create building blocks of
functionality, whether that is the skeleton framework of a page layout
or a nicely styled list of links, and store them as CSS classes that
can be quickly attached to my markup and modi?¬? ed for the speci?¬? c
use. I??™ve started to add these building blocks to a code library I call
Stylib that contains all kinds of interface elements, organized as CSS
code with its associated XHTML markup.
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