CSS for Babies: A Critical Analysis

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

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The following is a super-duper serious critical review of the book CSS for Babies. Super. Duper. Serious.

I’m afraid even the title of the book is an invalid CSS style declaration.
Are we capitalizing tag selectors now? That’s just weird. And type=”text/css”? What is this, 2010? And is there a space in the file name or not? I need to know, I’m following along at home here.
Didn’t we just learn what a selector was and that declarations have them? And what’s with #fffff. Baby is going to be learning to read here soon and that’s just confusing. I would have gone with, oh, maybe “white”.
Points for font-size eh? Are you just trying to cause your baby cross-browser testing pains? And I can’t even tell you the last time I used :link. My links are links. And I think your syntax highlighter is broken.
Presentational class names. Perfect. Especially when it doesn’t do the styling the name implies it does.
All navigation has to be in a list right? And you’re pretty sure you want to repeat the tag name in the identifier right? And you’re pretty sure you’ll never, ever use something like a navigation list on a page more than once right? And that set height on a text element. That’s almost always a good idea.
Makes sense to still keep teaching proprietary non-standard IE filters for sure for IE 8 and down for sure. By the time your baby is old enough to use a mouse it’ll be irrelevant but that’s OK. And you might as well set it to its default value too. Keep that code light!
Tag qualified presentational class names! Even better! And mixing unit types for related properties! And that width? That’s approximately 10 physical miles / 16 kilometers.

lol jk. I think this book is hilarious and makes a great baby gift.