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CSS Cross-browser Compatibility

A 1-day Advanced CSS Training Course in Bulletproof Web Design

* Open Public Course* Closed In-House Course

Making Advanced CSS More Reliable

This advanced CSS training course enables experienced web designers to tackle and overcome the tricky problems which can make advanced CSS web design difficult to implement in a cost-effective manner. Delegates will learn to diagnose, resolve and/or work around the most common problems, bugs, and browser incompatibilities encountered in advanced CSS web design. Expert instruction on these challenges is accompanied by best practice advice on how to create elegant, managable and affordable CSS in timely fashion.

Advanced CSS Course Background

The W3C’s (CSS standards) have been more successful than many people expected. So succesful, that practically all new web design (other than HTML-formatted email) is done primarily in CSS.

Sites that have successfully separated CSS design (from HTML-encoded content and mark-up) have reaped the promised rewards: faster, cleaner, SEO-friendlier, more accessible and more managable web design.

But two big challenges remain:

Unfortunately, the world’s most popular family of web browsers (Internet Explorer) has proved a major obstacle in meeting both of these challenges.

IE8 (released March 2009) was the first version of IE on Windows which conformed with CSS2's most basic requirement, i.e. that designers should be able to override default browser styles using only CSS. And that release (11 years after CSS2) barely signalled the ‘beginning of the end’ of the problem:

In short, anyone who wishes to deploy advanced CSS web design techniques needs to know how to make designs work (or at least gracefully degrade) on IE browsers that don't fully support CSS — and on browsers which do. Having several — per browser — alternative designs is not a cost-effective option.

A very small sample of CSS techniques that can have problems with IE6-IE8:

This advanced CSS training course is designed primarily to help experienced web designers deploy these (and many more) techniques easily and reliably, by identifying:

Target Audience for this Advanced CSS Course

Advanced CSS Course Prerequisites

Note: If you are unsure about whether your existing CSS skills, knowledge or experience meet these criteria, please telephone 0870 200 7273 and ask to speak to Dave Fisher (the course author and tutor). You can test the syntactical accuracy of your HTML/XHTML by running your pages through the W3C’s online HTML and CSS validators.

Advanced CSS Course Delivery

This advanced CSS training course is delivered through a mix of tutor instruction, discussion and hands-on practical work.

The amount of hands-on work depends greatly on the membership of the training group, but the proportion of time devoted to exercises is typically lower than it would be in a beginners class. There are however plenty of exercises for those who learn better that way.

In most cases, experienced designers prefer to cover as much ground as possible, using extensive questions and discussion to clarify techniques which they can experiment with at work or at home.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Leeds — £250 (+VAT)

  • 12 Jul 2012
  • 6 Sep 2012
  • 8 Nov 2012

London — £250 (+VAT)

  • 15 May 2012
  • 14 Jun 2012
  • 17 Jul 2012
  • 9 Aug 2012
  • 11 Sep 2012
  • 11 Oct 2012
  • 13 Nov 2012
  • 6 Dec 2012

Advanced CSS Course Contents:

Advanced CSS: Designing for Diversity by Managing Box Models

Advanced CSS: Standard vs. IE Float Models

Advanced CSS: IE’s hasLayout Property — The Hidden Source of Most Problems

Advanced CSS: Common Problems, Bugs and Fixes

Positioning and Auto Dimensions

An optional extra module — if time allows