The Book of CSS3, 2nd Edition

This book is the culmination of eight years’ writing about CSS3, both on the Web and in print. The browser and CSS landscape has changed a lot in that short time and continues to change today, bringing new features and implementations at a rate that’s difficult to keep up with. The CSS3 specification is written in (often dense) technical language that’s intended for implementers rather than end users, and my intent in writing this book was to bridge the gap between specification and web developer.

The book follows a loose order based on stability of implementation: In the earlier chapters, I cover the CSS properties that are well implemented and used on a daily basis, but as the book progresses, the technologies become more experimental and are implemented in fewer browsers. As a result, in the final few chapters I sometimes rely on interpretation of the CSS3 specification to explain how future properties should behave. I would hope that there are few mistakes, but I accept that any that exist are based on my own misunderstanding.

In addition to the various modules of the CSS3 specification itself, an invaluable resource for me while writing the book was the Mozilla Developer Network (https://developer.mozilla.org/), a peerless collection of articles about anything web related—not least CSS—which is all the more amazing for being written by volunteers.

The text used in many of the code examples is taken from books in the public domain that are available from Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/). All images in the book that are not my own creations are credited in the relevant chapters.

This book would not have been possible without the guidance of the team at No Starch Press, especially Serena Yang and my editors, Keith Fancher (first edition) and Bill Pollock (second edition); between them they made me write more clearly and helped me transition from blogger to author. I’d also like to thank my technical editors: Patrick Lauke’s rigorous eye for detail and understanding of technical specifications was instrumental in helping me find focus in the expanded scope of the second edition, and Joost de Valk not only acted as my technical editor for the first edition but also gave me my first opportunity to write about CSS3 when he created CSS3.info eight years ago.

I’d also like to thank my colleagues at Preloaded, Poke, Top10, and rehabstudio for their support and encouragement in writing two editions of this book; everyone at the many London web community meet-ups; my mum for teaching me the value of hard work; and my dad for buying me my first computer almost thirty years ago—I promised I’d pay him back one day, and hopefully this book will go some way toward that debt.