CSS: The Definitive Guide

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. 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 that were still being developed or were known to have support dropping soon are not covered here.

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!

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a powerful programming language that transforms the presentation of a document or a collection of documents, has spread to nearly every corner of the web as well as many ostensibly non web environments. For example, embedded device displays often use CSS to style their user interfaces, many RSS clients let you apply CSS to feeds and feed entries, and some instant message clients use CSS to format chat windows. Aspects of CSS can be found in the syntax used by JavaScript (JS) frameworks and even in JS itself. It’s everywhere!

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

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. CSS Fundamentals

Chapter 2. Selectors

Chapter 3. Pseudo-Class and -Element Selectors

Chapter 4. Specificity, Inheritance, and the Cascade

Chapter 5. Values and Units

Chapter 6. Basic Visual Formatting

Chapter 7. Padding. Borders. Outlines. and Margins

Chapter 8. Backgrounds

Chapter 9. Gradients

Chapter 10. Floating and Positioning

Chapter 11. Flexible Box Layout

Chapter 12. Grid Layout

Chapter 13. Table Layout in CSS

Chapter 14. Fonts

Chapter 15. Text Properties

Chapter 16. Lists and Generated Content

Chapter 17. Transforms

Chapter 18. Transitions

Chapter 19. Animation

Chapter 20. Filters, Blending, Clipping, and Masking

Chapter 21 . CSS At-Rules

About the Author

Eric A. Meyer is an internationally recognized expert on HTML, CSS, and web standards, founder of Complex Spiral Consulting, co-founder of the microformats movement, and co-founder of An Event Apart, the design conference series. He’s the author of previous editions of CSS: The Definitive Guide and several other books on CSS and design. You can find him at meyerweb.com.

Estelle Weyl is an open web evangelist and community engineer who has been developing standards-based accessible websites since 1999. She blogs about all things front end including CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript performance, accessibility and and the mobile web at standardista.com. You’ll find her either coding at home on her couch or speaking at conferences around the world.