Ebook: CSS: The Definitive Guide

If you're a web designer or app developer interested in sophisticated page styling, improved accessibility, and less time and effort expended, this book is for you. This revised fifth edition provides a comprehensive guide to CSS implementation along with a thorough review of the latest CSS specifications.

Authors Eric Meyer and Estelle Weyl show you how to improve user experience, speed development, avoid potential bugs, and add life and depth to your applications through layout, transitions and animations, borders, backgrounds, text properties, and many other tools and techniques. We read the specs so you don't have to!

If you are a web designer or document author interested in sophisticated page styling, improved accessibility, and saving time and effort, this book is for you. All you really need to know before starting the book is HTML 4.0. The better you know HTML, the better prepared you’ll be, but it is not a requirement. You will need to know very little else to follow this book.

This fifth edition of the book was finished at the end of 2022 and does its best to reflect the state of CSS at that time. The assumption is that anything covered in detail either had wide browser support at the time of writing or was known to be coming soon after publication. CSS features which were still being developed, or were known to have support dropping soon, are not covered here.

This guide covers:
Selectors, specificity, and the cascade, including information on the new cascade layers
New and old CSS values and units, including CSS variables and ways to size based on viewports
Details on font technology and ways to use any available font variants
Text styling, from basic decoration to changing the entire writing mode
Padding, borders, outlines, and margins, now discussed in terms of the new block- and inline-direction layout paradigm used by modern browsers
Colors, backgrounds, and gradients, including the conic gradients
Accessible data tables
Flexible box and grid layout systems, including new subgrid capabilities
2D and 3D transforms, transitions, and animation
Filters, blending, clipping, and masking
Media, feature, and container queries