Useful for both Web designers and developers, Core CSS: Cascading Style Sheets provides a definitive guide to style sheets, which provide a new level of flexibility for browser-based content. With a comprehensive reference to all CSS1 and CSS2 features and an excellent survey of which features work in eight of today's browsers, this book shows off the strengths of style sheets for the next generation of Web content.

Particularly for developers, CSS allows more precise control of elements inside browsers, making it a lot easier to create Web clients that compete with traditional stand-alone applications. But support for CSS in today's browsers is spotty. The strength of this book is that it explains both the CSS1 and CSS2 standards, even though they are still under development. This text shows off what each property is supposed to accomplish with sample HTML and screenshots. The author is careful to note problems with CSS properties in today's browsers. For the CSS1 standard, every property is marked as being unsafe, safe, or partially implemented on no less than eight browsers (including Netscape 3 and 4.x, Internet Explorer 3 through 5, and Opera for Windows, UNIX, and Mac platforms).

The second part of the book is devoted to the CSS2 standard with a description of proposed support for Unicode, for formatting Web pages (with paged media properties), and for tagging content so that it can be read out loud by computer-generated voices. Although still under construction, the CSS1 and CSS2 standards will certainly offer a better Internet for us all. In the meantime, Core CSS: Cascading Style Sheets describes what's available in today's browsers. It's a solid reference that will make CSS understandable to anyone, regardless of their level of Web expertise.