Some important updates re: CSS
Hello all! I've been keeping my mouth shut about these updates for a while, but now I'm ready to spill.
- I have been working on a livelesson for Prentice Hall that covers the basics of CSS in ~6 hours, and I'm almost done! If you haven't heard of these, livelessons are video tutorials that you can purchase digitally or on DVD. As far as I know, mine will be the first on the topic of CSS, and I can promise you that I've packed some really good material into it. I'll have more info about this soon, so stay tuned!
- I am launching a site specifically for teaching CSS, as a way to follow up the impending success of my livelesson. It's called CSS Is Easy. I plan to publish more video tutorials through this site, and share links to other references & articles about CSS on the web. Even though I've said in the past that CSS is incredible difficult to master, I want to change that, and CSS Is Easy is my plan to make it happen.
- I got married on May 23rd, 2009. If we are friends on Facebook, you'll have access to my pictures.
Isn't CSS–or really any markup–damn easy to learn? I'm not sure I approve of teaching CSS. It's like teaching someone how to use a dictionary. Possible, but pointless.
2 reasons why it is not easy to learn:
CSS is not always intuitive, and even when it is, browsers always find a way to make it counter-intuitive. If all browsers supported CSS3 completely, I would have nothing to talk about… instead, I have a whole chapter on preventing problems in IE 6.
The syntax may be easy to pick up, but the methods are not. In the first chapter of my livelesson, I point the viewer to some sites where they can learn all the properties of CSS. I then spend the next four chapters talking about how to use them to actually build websites. One chapter is all about 3 different ways to use CSS sprites. So in a way, I am teaching people more "web design with CSS" than just CSS.
Hope that helps.