Beginners to CSS have a rough time of it. There's no escaping that tough, frustrating early stage before the light bulb clicks on and CSS becomes the coolest tool in your web kit. If you're a newcomer to CSS, welcome to the trenches. But don't despair—grab yourself a copy of Virginia DeBolt's newest book and you'll work your way through the newbie stage in no time at all.
Maybe it's because I just had a birthday. Or maybe it's that I recently passed my 10th anniversary of building web sites. But lately I seem to hear more people than usual wondering if this "working with the web" business isn't a younger person's game.
I recently spent a great deal of time on the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) site, combing through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 working draft. There's a lot of very fine material in that document. Unfortunately, for the average designer it's pretty much, well, inaccessible.
Web Standards Creativity is a fascinating look at how some of the best designers in the business use web standard compliant markup and CSS to take web design to new heights of style and function. Based on actual "case studies," it's also an intriguing look inside these designers heads. The decision-making process they reveal teaches us as much about good design as the methods they're describing.