I have to say that CSS Mastery is far from being obsolete. IE7 is not very standards compliant (yes, they support PNG now, but that has nothing to do with CSS). Their support for CSS barely reaches the CSS 1.0 standard. I still run into a considerable number of problems with IE7 on a number of issues. And to say that the techniques of the book are obsolete when many people won’t upgrade to IE7 (I know quite a few people who never update their computers using Windows Update) is silly.

Backwards compatibility is still the name of the game when it comes to designing web pages.

Things change so fast. Impact of this is that computer books I buy one year are usually useless the next.

Since IE7 is out, most of the content of a recently published book such as CSS Mastery is… well, not so useful anymore (sort of an understatement). CSS Mastery provides solutions that bend backwards to accomodate the “present”, the non-standard-compliant browser IE. Now that IE 7 is out, and that it supports PNG… (for example), and that people are forced to update to IE 7, and that it is impossible to download and install IE 6 now, then the whole chapter on images and drop shadows in CSS Mastery is… useless in that book. Same with the hack and filter chapter. If you are able now to do what it takes to accomodate both the present and the future, then the smart move is to do just that.

I came to the web fairly late in my life. I came from the world of C++ (as an engineer). I did not have to un-learn habits… I find XHTML easy, consistent, and I just… use it. Why use HTML when you can use XHTML ? (refering to David’s argument, with whom I agree on this matter).

Since XML doesn’t define the meaning or purpose of any tag or attribute, it doesn’t matter if you use deprecated attributes in an XHTML document. Of course, deprecated attributes may not be supported by future browsers, but they remain perfectly valid as XML. The key point is that the document can still be parsed correctly, whereas an HTML document cannot.