Designers like Andy Clarke say we have got to move beyond the non-standard browsers. He calls his design approach — and that of many others in the fore front of CSS design — “Transcendent CSS” — which also happens to be the title of his book. Transcendent CSS reaches beyond the traditional browser by only coding the latest approved of CSS standards, without worrying about hacks to make the design work in browsers such as Internet Explorer 5 and 6 and before.

After reading Clarke’s book which was edited by Molly Holzschlag, I decided to start a project that would migrate IT-Enquirer and other sites I designed into CSS heavyweights without reservations. There would have to be different stylesheets, one for each type of browser, and all available CSS 2.1 selectors would be used if necessary. IT-Enquirer was my test bed; the re-styling is what you see today. The CSS code for other usage but the screen is still underway.

Clarke argues that designers let themselves be held back by using only CSS that’s used by the least common denominator. Instead, he says, if we want to move forward and create good-looking web sites, we should forget about old browsers, and use Javascript and the DOM to plug the holes in CSS. He also claims we should be using CSS 3 where possible, to look to the future.

Furthermore, in his book, Clarke says web designers should use semantic naming conventions and microformats, so that the markup on the page is more meaningful. The author also covers the workflow of designer teams, where common naming conventions can help streamline the designing process.

IT-Enquirer being the one-man show that it still is, I hardly have a use for conventional naming mechanisms, but with the semantic conventions Clarke certainly has a point. I’ve now tried to name as many CSS elements semantically meaningful, and use “sitestructure” instead of “navigation” and “offsiteactions” instead of “sidebar”, to name but two examples.

Clarke discusses everything else you need to know to get working results that look their best. He insists on using grids and wireframes, something Ben Henick also make a point of in his article on A List Apart (Avoid Edge Cases by Designing Up Front). To make my grid for IT-Enquirer — I have kept the 3-column grid — I used xScope, a utility for Mac OS X that enables you to create rectangles, guidelines, cross=hairs, and more, in any program. I used it to adjust the column widths so that they more or less match the golden ratio.

Absolute Positioning Versus Floats

The old(er) design of IT-Enquirer used floats. Clarke says in his book that floats have more disadvantages than benefits. And after the re-styling, I am inclined to tell him right. Although I found Internet Explorer 7 (!) still can’t make anything decent from my navigation bar at the top. But that one still uses a floating element, to be honest.

To sum up this out-of-the-ordinary book review, I should perhaps mention that Clarke covers not just the theory of it all. The book is filled with coding examples, examples by way of screenshot, and just good, sound advice for those working on web design projects professionally. In the last few chapters he will take you through a couple of projects that prove his points.

The final chapter discusses CSS 3 elements. Judging from that chapter, I think web designers have a couple of exciting years ahead of them. Not surprisingly, the author mentions multi-column layouts, but there’s plenty more where that came from. Multiple background images, for example.