Interview with CSS Cookbook Author

I recently had a chance to conduct an interview with Christopher Schmitt, author of the among other books. BabbleList.com, a web design mailing list I moderate. I was Senior Design Technologist for a web firm at the time. So I tackled all sorts of web design and development matters that could either give our company an edge over the competition or make production faster. One of things I was tackling was pure-CSS layouts before anyone else had really thought about doing it. Building with CSS is so commonplace these days, that I believe most web developers coming into the field these days don't know what a really frustrating experience. The browser didn't implement CSS well, the concepts for CSS layouts were still raw and, well, it was a lot of frustration, but I believe it was all worth it! PF:Which sites, blogs or mailing lists do you read to keep up with the latest on CSS? CS: There are the usual suspects: positioniseverything.net, css-discuss.incutio.com, etc. The best thing, though, is looking at good design and trying to implement it with CSS they best you can. PF: What is your favorite underused CSS trick, property, psudo-class, etc? CS: My favorite thing to do right now is to make use of PNGs with alpha transparency. At PF: How does IE 7 compare to Firefox for adhearing to standards? CS: I think IE7 does a fairly good job. It's somewhat unfair to compare Firefox to IE7. Firefox has a had a team of developers working on the browser for a long time with a more focused agenda. IE7 is, by far, the best IE browser for standards support. Also, the IE team are working towards releasing at least two more major version updates after IE7. So, really, as a web designer and developer, I'm happy with that. PF: What does a Christopher Schmitt do, when not writing books, or building web sites? CS: Well, I do seem to do a lot of both, don't I? For fun, I do some rock climbing, yoga, traveling, and reading. I'd like to squeeze in time for learning how to swing dance and cook, but we will see what the new year brings. *Originally published at Pete Freitag's Homepage Pete Freitag (http://foundeo.com/) that specializes in Web Consulting, and Products for Web Developers.