Posts from October 2017

“CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition” Release and Contents

Published 6 years, 4 months past

CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition is wending its way to the reading public, and I have some updates on that.

The O’Reilly catalog still says October 2017, but for the physical copy, Barnes & Noble and Amazon are now listing a release date of November 5th, 2017, so we seem to have just missed that October release window I was hoping to hit.  But not by much!  The DRM-free version at eBooks is apparently available now, as are Nook and Kindle versions.

For those of you with access to O’Reilly’s Safari subscription service, there’s an older version of the book currently available.  Apparently, so many people have joined the queue to get it that the content-update process breaks.  (Our production editor was impressed.)  O’Reilly’s engineering staff is aware of the problem and working on it, so hopefully by the time you read this, the problem will be resolved and the final copy online.  If not, our apologies, and thanks for your patience.

If you’re wondering if this edition is for you, absolutely it is!  But I would say that, wouldn’t I?  As would my co-author Estelle.  To help you decide, here’s the Table of Contents with a few brief notes on the new things contained therein (chapters marked ALL NEW! are chapters that didn’t exist at all in the 3rd Edition):

  1. CSS and Documents – a brief overview of what CSS is for, how to apply it (including via HTTP headers!), basic syntax, media and feature queries
  2. Selectors – all the selectors as of mid-2017, including :not(), validity pseudo-classes, the case-insensitivity modifier in attribute selectors, and more
  3. Specificity and the Cascade – probably the least-changed chapter, this lays out the cascade in some detail
  4. Values and Units – adds viewport units, ch (which does not actually mean “one character”), calc(), and various new color syntaxes like HSL and #RRGGBBAA patterns
  5. Fonts – includes a lot about @font-face and the process of loading custom fonts, in addition to the classics like weight, style, variant, family, etc.
  6. Text Properties – adds a fair amount of material on non-horizontal writing and alignment, writing modes, hyphenation, and so forth
  7. Basic Visual Formatting – this is another chapter that didn’t change a huge amount from the 3rd Edition, though it does touch on the new values for display
  8. Padding, Borders, Outlines, and Margins – to all the existing details on those basic topics, we’ve added border-radius and all the properties that affect image borders
  9. Colors, Backgrounds, and Gradients – there are all the new background-related properties like background-size and background-clip, handling multiple background images, and the wonder world of linear and radial gradients, explained in more detail than anyone probably thought reasonable, plus there’s a section on box-shadow
  10. Floating and Shapes – floating hasn’t changed much, but the section on Float Shapes is all new and pretty nifty, if I do say so myself
  11. Positioning – this got a section on sticky positioning to go along with the classic positioning material
  12. Flexible Box Layout – ALL NEW! – the ins and outs, the nitty-gritty, the pros and cons of Flexbox
  13. Grid Layout – ALL NEW! – Grid is here and it’s hot; this chapter explores it in up-to-the-minute detail
  14. Table Layout in CSS – the third of the minimally-updated chapters, this discusses how data tables are laid out
  15. Lists and Generated Content – a surprisingly large amount of new material in this chapter, pretty much all centered around @counter-style and its capabilities and how you can create emoji counting systems
  16. Transforms – ALL NEW! – rotating, scaling, translating, 3D effects, and more, all with a minimum of matrix math
  17. Transitions – ALL NEW! – state-based animations and how to define them, introducing some of the basic animation concepts along the way
  18. Animation – ALL NEW! – stateless animations, which can happen at any time, for any reason you choose to define, made possible through @keyframes and a bevy of new properties
  19. Blending, Filtering, Compositing, and Masking – ALL NEW! – all (okay, almost all) the nifty things you used to do in Photoshop, now available natively in browsers, so you can do grayscale images that pop color on hover or click without having to produce two separate images
  20. Media-Dependent Styles – this was almost ALL NEW!, but it’s a radically reworked chapter from the 3rd Edition with fewer bits about printing, no bits on audio, and a whole lot of details about media queries

And then the Appendices:

  1. Animatable Properties – a list of CSS2.1 properties that are animatable, with a note on exactly what can be animated
  2. Basic Property Reference – a compact table of properties, their default values, and the complete value syntax
  3. Color Equivalence Table – the 148 color names defined in CSS Color Level 4 with their equivalents in RGB decimal, RGB percentage, HSL, and hexadecimal formats

Whew!  After all that, you might be thinking that, much like Emacs, this book has everything.  And I’d like to say that it does, but… it doesn’t.  For example, I decided fairly late in the process to drop multicolumn properties.  It was a tough decision, but when I started testing browser support and looking at the state of the specification, it felt too unstable to include.  I’ve rushed explanations in past editions, and usually regretted it.  (Although, fun fact: the 2nd Edition contains the only known documentation of the CSS Working Group’s multi-hour discussion on how the old clip property was supposed to work.)  So I put multicolumn off for the next edition.

Still, there are far far far more examples of things added in than things left out, enough to make this edition twice as long as the previous.  There’s been a lot of growth in CSS over the past decade, and I think Estelle and I have brought together something that will get you up to speed on very nearly all of it.  For those of you eagerly waiting on a copy, we really hope you enjoy the result!


“CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition” Goes to Print

Published 6 years, 5 months past

Yesterday afternoon, CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition went to the printers.  Eighteen years after the First Edition hit shelves, eleven years after its predecessor came out, five years after I first started working on this edition, and thanks in no small part to Estelle Weyl and a parade of long-suffering editors at O’Reilly, the last changes were entered, the pages were locked, and the repository closed.

It comes in at 1,088 pages: almost exactly twice the length of the Third Edition, with six new chapters and a lot of overhauling of old chapters.  Flexbox, Grid, filtering, blending, clipping and masking, float shapes, animations and transitions, transforms, image borders, counting systems, custom properties (a.k.a. CSS variables), media and feature queries — they’re all in there, and a whole lot more besides.  Gradients got a major new section in what used to be called just “Colors and Backgrounds” and is now “Colors, Backgrounds, and Gradients”.  And all the new background properties!  So many new background properties.

We didn’t skimp on the visuals, either.  The book has, if I counted correctly, a total of 778 figures.  Almost all of them were captured in-browser, and you can download or clone all the files from GitHub.  If you’d rather just browse them online, you can do so thanks to GitHub Pages.  That’s also where to find the transition and animation examples that are referenced in the text, but not figures themselves (detailed animation being somewhat difficult to represent on paper).  If we add figures and animation examples together, there are 826 elements supporting the main text.  Which feels like a lot to me.

The book will be available in both tree-wafer and glowing-display formats from your favorite supplier of such things; e.g., Amazon.  (If you’re going to buy through Amazon and are inclined to support another aspect of my life, please designate Rebecca’s Gift as your Amazon Smile recipient before buying the book.)  I also hear tell it will be available DRM-free from eBooks.com, and potentially in PDF form for those who prefer it.  O’Reilly doesn’t sell books directly any more, but I do believe it will be avialable to those with Safari subscriptions.

I’ll have more to say about the book and its contents as the release date draws closer.  Last I heard, it should be out by the end of this month, but as always, release dates can slip for any number of reasons.  Even if this release does slip, it should still come out no later than early November.

(Let’s hope I didn’t just jinx that.)

This is always a tense and exhilarating time.  What if I got a huge piece completely wrong?  What if I made the wrong calls on what to include and what to defer to the next edition?  What if I missed egregious typos?  What if nobody likes it?  Basically, the same doubts that strike most any author.  But there’s also the incredible feeling of a project brought to its conclusion and the anticipation of getting it into readers’ hands.  This has been a longer-than-usual time coming, but as it usually does, the time has come at last.  I hope you’re looking forward to it half as much as I am.


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