Wednesday 19th of June 2013 06:24:58 PM

Preface

The subject of this book is, as you might have guessed by the cover, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). There are two "levels" to CSS; these are referred to as CSS1 and CSS2. The difference between the two is that CSS2 is all of CSS1, plus a lot more. This book attempts to cover all of CSS1, and CSS positioning, which is a part of CSS2. The rest of CSS2 is excluded because, at the time of this writing, nobody had implemented most of it. Rather than cover a lot of theoretical territory, we chose to stick to what was currently usable.

If you are a web designer or document author interested in sophisticated page styling, improved accessibility, and saving time and effort, then this book is for you. All you really need before starting the book is a decent knowledge of HTML 4.0. The better you know HTML, of course, the better prepared you'll be. You will need to know very little else in order to follow this book.

It is important to remember something about web standards and books: the former are continually evolving, while the latter are frozen in time (until the next edition comes out, anyway). In the case of HTML and CSS, there are a great many changes afoot even as these words are being written. The recent formalization of XHTML 1.0 as a full W3C Recommendation, for example, is a major milestone in the evolution of the World Wide Web. There are likely to be even more levels to CSS, further extending the ability to style documents; major web browsers are approaching full CSS1 support, and robust CSS2 implementations can be seen lurking on the horizon. This is an exciting time to be a designer, and learning CSS now will give you a leg up on the future.

0.1. Typographical Conventions

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Constant width: is used to indicate code examples, HTML tags and CSS elements.
Constant width italic: is used for replaceables that appear in text.
Italic: is used to introduce new terms and to indicate URLs, filenames, and pathnames.
TIP: indicates a note or tip relating to the nearby text.
WARNING: indicates a warning.

should be upright. In order to employ this effect, shown in Figure 5-28, you would use these styles:

BLOCKQUOTE {font-style: italic;}BLOCKQUOTE EM, BLOCKQUOTE I {font-style: normal;}

Figure 5-28. Common typographical conventions through CSS

App server developers are not restricted to using HTTP, they can transmit and recieve XML information using simple remote CORBA objects and RMI objects. The key is that by using XML, it makes these remote services or objects easier to build. And, by sticking with XML, any one of these technologies can be used in your design of your app server. You can use whatever technology is most appropriate to getting the job done, knowing that all the information flows as XML and can be processed by any part of the system. The reason Java object serialization did not achieve this is because it encodes object data to a binary format that is dependent on too many things (like the JVM version, and the existence of classes when things are deserialized, etc). XML is not limited by any of these restrictions (or problems), which makes it much easier to create systems that allow XML information to flow between different subsystems. Also by relying only on the data, large portions of the system can be replaced with better or different implementations for future-readiness.

App servers traditionally give their client apps access to information in remote databases, remote file systems, remote object repositories, remote web resources, and even other app servers. All these information sources don't even need to reside on the machine that hosts the app server. These remote resources may be on other machines on the Intranet or the Internet. Using Java and XML, RMI, JDBC, CORBA, JNDI, Servlet and Swing, you can create app servers that can integrate all kinds of remote and local information resources, and client apps that allow you to remotely or locally access this information from the app server.

In the future, with publicly available DTDs that are standardized for each vertical industry, XML based app servers will become very popular. Also when XML schema repositories become available and widely used, app servers will be able to take on a new role and provide application services that are not offered now. Companies will need to share information with other companies in related fields, and each company might have a different software system in which all their data is housed. By agreeing upon a set of DTDs or schemas (encoded in XML), these companies can exchange information with each other regardless of what systems they are using to store this information. If their app servers can exchange XML documents (based on some shared DTD or schema), then these disparate app servers can understand each other and share information. One of the uses for XML foreseen by the W3C is just this, vertical industries (like insurance and health care) creating sets of DTDs and schemas that all companies in the industry agree upon. Then these companies' app servers can talk to each other using some popular protocol (like HTTP or CORBA/IIOP) to exchange information between each other. This has the potential to save a lot of time and money in the daily business operations of these companies.

Web-based Applications

8.3.1. Floating: The Details

A series of specific rules governthe placement of a floated element. They are vaguely similar to thosethat govern the evaluation of margins and widths and have the sameinitial appearance of common sense. They are as follows:

1. The left (or right) outer edge of a floated element maynot be to the left (or right) of the inner edge of its parentelement.


Copyright Page		0.2. Property Conventions