Handcrafted CSS: By Dan Cederholm – Review
With: Gene Crawford & Giovanni Defeterici

Gene: This is Gene and Gio. We’re going to talk about the new-ish book, “Handcrafted CSS”, by Dan Cederholm.

Giovanni: Great book. Great book.

Gene: He’s the former author of “The Bulletproof Web Design” book, which is one of the staples in my bookshelf. So yeah, so this book I think came out at the end of last year, 2009, and both Gio and I have read this, and we just wanted to talk about some of the concepts and things in it.

Giovanni: I read it more than once.

Gene: You read it more than once?

Giovanni: Yeah, because I used it to learn about some of these progressive methods and right approaches to using them. So, yeah, it was great for me. I loved it.

Gene: First off, the thing I liked about it most was that it didn’t come off as a textbook. He presents it as a philosophy.

Giovanni: Yeah, I agree. That was the thing that I thought was so great about it, that it does go through some steps, teaches you about specific things in it, even browser specific problems with implementation, but I love the way he approaches the material and talks about what the web could be, and how to use it.

Gene: Yeah. It’s a little more than just a tips and tricks book. It goes into the nature of what we do, I think.

Giovanni: Definitely.

Gene: Well, to give a little technical detail, he starts out with his case study, which is… He uses Tugboat Coffee Company, whatever. The thing is, the Tugboat Coffee Company website design is actually, like, really damn good. You know, I remember looking at the site going, “Whoa. You know, that’s a great looking site design, just for an example.”

But, that’s where he starts going into a lot of details and things, and I know it’s right in the front of the book, but one of my favorite parts of it, having taught several classes on CSS and HTML, is the way he just gets into lists and links, because often that’s one of the hardest things for people to grasp, and he really just gives you a clinic on it.

Giovanni: Yeah. It’s a great way. And a lot of times we learn how to mark them up and not necessarily why you should mark them up a certain way, and he really goes into that a lot. It’s really great.

Gene: Yeah, that is a good section. Just how to build that nav, how to tweak the list. He even goes into how to use it to do graphing and things like that. I thought that was really clever. There’s a lot of stuff in here.

Like I said, he goes through the litany of things like lists, using them to make navigation, using RGBA. He talks a lot about progressive enrichment, rewarding people who come to your sites with newer browsers by giving them something really rich and interesting.

Giovanni: Hey, you know one thing about that that I liked a lot was that it takes away… If you can really think about things in the way that he’s thinking about them, it takes away a lot of the fear of implementing these things.

Gene: It really does.

Giovanni: Because, as a designer, you can be afraid of what, it’s going to break your site, or it’s not going to look right, or it’s not going to be exactly the same in every single browser, or you might have to do all kinds of other fancy stuff just to make it that way.

Gene: That’s right. Or how am I going to push this out in the client situation, and then how am I going to support this thing? You know? I’m going to get in trouble, and lose money later or something. Where [inaudible] come from.

Giovanni: And out of all of this stuff, I think that’s my favorite thing. This book really is a proponent of, is that we as people working on the web, doing things on the web, can utilize the nature of the web, and that it is variable, you know? There are a million browsers, and you what I mean? There are all these different operating systems.

All of this stuff is different, and we fight it all the time, and instead of fighting it, he’s just working with what he has and approaching things in a really practical and simple…

I want to say simplistic, but it’s just an elegant way in that you can do as much with the CSS as you can, and any place that you can do more, it’s just a reward. And I love that because it means that people with better browsers get a better experience.

And you can think about that whatever way you want, but I really believe that’s going to help push things in the direction that we, as people building things on the web, want it to go.

Gene: Absolutely. You sound like you’ve been drinking the Cederholm kool-aid.

Giovanni: Yeah, it’s great. I love it, I love it.

Gene: Well, one of the final things that I really dug about this book was, I think it’s the last chapter, where he really goes into craftsmanship and the need and the value that you should place in a high level of craftsmanship and putting that into your work.

And if you know anything about Dan Cederholm or you follow his blog SimpleBits, or just know anything about him, you know that he’s really focused on putting a high level of craftsmanship and finish on everything. Just because it might look simple doesn’t mean there’s not a high level of finish and a large amount of work that gets put into something.

Giovanni: That’s true. A lot of this progressive CSS is, is about real small details that make it so much better.

Gene: Yeah, that’s right. And a small percentage of your user base might actually never… or a small percentage might be the only ones that actually see it.

Giovanni: Yeah, that’s true. But again, it’s that reward.

Gene: Absolutely.

Giovanni: It’s totally worth it, I think, and the more you use it, the more people will be interested in supporting it, the more you’ll get better at just using it. It will become part of your vocabulary. It’s great. It’s where we need to be, if not now, in the future. Even better now.

Gene: That’s right. And, you know, we’re just talking about the general concept that he built on top of this book. It does go through all the technical things that you want to get out of a book like this, and it’s very modern. It’s very up to date.

If there was any book that you were going to go out and buy that was to cover a lot of the most modern techniques, this is probably it in my opinion.

Giovanni: And techniques that you can really use now. That’s the thing. He emphasizes the ones that you can really, actually, use on a day to day basis. He just decided to.

Gene: Yeah, that’s right. Plus, there’s like four, five pages on ampersands.

Giovanni: Yeah, you have got to love that. That’s awesome.

Gene: Pick the right ampersand. That’s awesome. Well, thank you.

There’s a website for the book too: handcraftedcss.com, if you’re going to buy it why not buy it from Amazon.com and give us credit too?