Foreword

WEBSITES ARE NOT the same as pictures of websites. When one person designs in Photoshop and another converts the design to markup and CSS, the coder must make guesses and assumptions about what the designer intended. This interpretive process is never without friction—unless the coder is Dan Cederholm. When Dan codes other people’s designs, he gets everything right, including the parts the designer got wrong. For instance, Dan inevitably translates a designer’s fixed Photoshop dimensions into code that is flexible, accessible, and bulletproof. (Indeed, Dan coined the phrase “bulletproof web design” while teaching the rest of us how to do it.)

In Dan’s case, flexible never means sloppy. The details always matter. That’s because Dan is not only a brilliant front-end developer and user advocate, he is also a designer to his core. He dreams design, bleeds design, and even gave the world a new way to share design at dribbble.com. Dan is also a born teacher and funny guy whose deadpan delivery makes Steven Wright look giddy by comparison. Dan speaks all over, helping designers improve their craft, and he not only educates, he kills.

And that, my friends, is why we’ve asked him to be our (and your) guide to CSS3. You couldn’t ask for a smarter, more experienced, more design-focused guide or a bigger web standards geek than our man Dan. Enjoy the trip!

—Jeffrey Zeldman