on 3 April 2009‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,’ as somebody said. I wonder what they’d have thought of writing books about computing. Had a look in Borders today, vaguely hoping to acquire something to improve my CSS. I almost picked up Craig’s book, because Craig is a friend and also happens to know more about compliant web design than God, but it wasn’t quite what I needed; and the title that looked most promising was dated 2006 and kept going on about IE5. I’m sure there are lots of websites that need to work in IE5, but mine ain’t one of them and life’s too short.
I also noticed that there was only one book on QuarkXPress in the entire section (compared to about two dozen on InDesign), and it was even older, covering version 6.
Blimey. When booksellers will stock – and presumably their customers will buy – books that date as fast as this, we must be crazy to worry about monthly magazines being too slow to compete with the web.
adambanksdotcom @Herring1967 "watching on screen"?! That's not a subeditor, it's a butcher with English as a third language
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
To be fair, the book specifically says IE can largely get stuffed, because this is a book about standards, and then spends an entire chapter talking about dealing with IE quirks via conditional comments and IE-specific style sheets.
That said, the book is now outdated in some areas of technique, not least regarding fonts and grids. Unfortunately, due to a combination of circumstances, I can’t see me ever writing another book along these lines.