Welcome to CSS3

CSS3 provides you with exciting new tools for your web development toolbox, allowing you to accomplish many styling tasks in a much easier, more flexible, and less hackish manner than you’ve been used to when working with CSS2. The following chapters will introduce you to the most useful, new CSS3 features and show you how to use them in real projects today, as well as provide alternatives and fallbacks for less-capable browsers. Before you start this book, make sure you have the following prerequisites. Now that you have all of the tools you need laid out in front of you, you’re ready to go and make beautiful CSS3 music. Let’s get going.

HTML and CSS Basic Knowledge

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This book assumes you are well versed in basic HTML(4) and CSS(2) features and techniques. But just in case you need to look up any of the basics, keep some decent reference material to hand. A wealth of excellent tutorials is available on the W3C Web Education Community Wiki at www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/Main_Page.

The Latest, Greatest Browsers

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Be sure to install the latest versions of desktop Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer (IE). Ideally, you should have a testing environment available for all modern browsers; have as many to hand as you can.

Older, Less-capable Browsers

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Have older, less-capable browsers available for testing fallbacks, polyfills, and graceful degradation. Run older versions of IE on multiple virtual machines (VirtualBox is an acceptable, free option at www.virtualbox.org). Camino is a good option for a test Mac-based browser that doesn’t support most of the new CSS3/HTML5 features.

Alternative Browsing Devices

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To test sites on different screen sizes, resolutions, and control mechanisms, have at least one or two alternative browsing devices. Mobile phones and tablets are essential fodder. A web-enabled TV would also be fun!

Debugging environments

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When it comes to choosing debugging environments, you have so many choices! Dragonfly on Opera, Firebug on Firefox; hell, every browser tends to come with a respectable debugging environment these days. Be sure to become familiar with as many as possible so you’ll have the best chance at tracking down irksome bugs.

A Decent Text Editor

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A good text editor is all you need to write CSS and HTML. Coda on the Mac is awesome (http://panic.com/coda), but it’s not free. Good free alternatives are Notepad++ for Windows, Text Wrangler for Mac, and Bluefish for Linux. WYSIWYG environments are not recommended, especially for learning. I’m a big fan of Jared Spool’s quip about them being more like “WYSI ... WTF”!

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