There are those on these boards who snipe at Stu Nicholls, which might be the reason his CSSPlay site was left off. (Can’t speak for the author, just speculating.) I can understand it to an extent, but Nicholls has done fabulous work making easy-to-use CSS elements–nav menus and other goodies–available to the non-professional coder like myself. I agree, he should be included.
And as much as I detest MySpace, I have to give it credit. As some of you know, I teach “at-risk” kids. I have an elective Web design class going on (very basic stuff), and some of the kids are interested in crafting pages to look and feel like MySpace pages. It’s getting their interest and as a result they’re learning to code and design. If it gets their attention and involvement, it’s a good thing.
@Black Max & everyone
To be completely honest, CSSPlay was left off the list because I’ve never used it as a point of reference.
Although it does have a ton of great content, I would tend to lump it in with sites such as “Positioning is Everything” that contains mostly tips and tricks.
With them being in the same general category I only wanted to list one of them (as to not be redundant), and fit as many different sites in the list as possible. Much like what I did with the CSS template and gallery sites.
While CSSPlay has some great tips in it, I felt like many of them were things we could have come up with on our own and PIE contained fixes to problems that had us (me) pulling out our (my) hair.
A List Apart and Eric Meyer were the keys for me - them and one of those giant red Wrox books on CSS that I bought back in 1999. I’d been evangelising about CSS for a while before ESPN.com showed the world that a mainstream site could go wholesale CSS and I remember feeling delighted at the time.
Eric Meyer answered a lot of CSS questions I had. He is an excellent communicator.
Firebug/Codeburner is another resource that has made it easy for me to see the HTML and CSS side by side
If you haven’t already been there, check out cssplay.com. They should be on the list as well.
Kudos on picking MySpace. It’s the Zen Garden for techies and non-techies alike. It has lots of superfluous containers that allow you to really customise the layout, and it raises additional challenges by being tables-based.
For me it was definitely A List Apart that was the first site I knew using CSS for layout.
As for using CSS in general, sites have been using it for many years longer, but just for things like changing link colors or removing the link underline. I remember when I first noticed a site with links that had no underline. That is when I first learned about CSS.
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