Cooke on Cascading Style Sheets

Charles Cooke has donated a great deal of time and patience to users of Nvu and KompoZer WYSIWYG HTML editors. I reported his update to the User's Guide. Cooke’s guide is really helpful if one reads instructions.

His latest work is Introduction to CSS Cascading Style Sheets. The Introduction to CSS is clear, concise, and non-judgmental just like his User’s Guide. Here’s how he defines his purpose for this one:

This guide is not here to teach cook book stuff; on the contrary I hope the reader will gain a firm basic understanding of the methods and principles involved in using stylesheets. It is an introduction to CSS not a complete guide so there will be aspects that will simply not be touched on at all. I hope that will prove a strength rather than a shortcoming. By limiting the scope, which is pretty wide anyhow, readers should be able to concentrate on the essentials.

There is some pretty clever “how to stuff” in the document and some pops down when clicked to give a step by step instructions when using KompoZer. I use KompoZer and found those tips to be very helpful. A general read also gives new users background to begin to understand the black art of CSS. Maybe I will understand enough of it to use the drop down device someday but as usual, Charles’ pages are imaginative with rock solid code.

When I was looking for a free WYSIWYG HTML editor Charles’ User Guide and the Nvu support forum sealed the deal. Charles occasionally contributed to the support forum but his posts were always spot on. He was able to convey the gist of an issue in a very few words. One of my favorites was:

If you could become hoarse using a keyboard I would become hoarse advising people to avoid using Transitional doctype.

That was the “defining moment” as they say. A host of other issues suddenly made sense to me. If one used transitional then Internet Explorer shifted to quirks mode and strange things happened. By setting KompoZer to “strict” the strange behavior went away.

Charles made a number of contributions to the Nvu forum knowledge base that were like that. I collected some and posted them so others would better understand how to deal with IE and Firefox differences.

The Nvu forum is locked for posting but can be searched even today to find answers to questions. In many respects answers -- clear, concise, and relevant answers -- are easier to find on the closed forum than on the active, authoring forum that followed it.

The Introduction to CSS Cascading Style Sheets when used with the improved Cascades editor built into KompoZer 7.10 has made CSS easier to use but the process is far from intuitive. My hat is off once again to Mr. Cooke for his contribution.

Wysi

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