Sinabro

On Slashdot:

Michael J. Ross writes “For Web developers who appreciate the value of separating Web content from its presentation, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has proved a godsend, because it allows all of the styling of a Web site to be organized in CSS files separate from the site’s semantic content, in HTML files (possibly dynamically generated). Yet to make this styling power possible, CSS must incorporate a long list of syntax elements, including hundreds of selectors, properties, and values. Thus it can be quite handy for the developer to have on hand a concise summary of CSS, such as the CSS Pocket Reference, authored by Eric A. Meyer.”

I would have so bought this book … except that it’s published by O’Reily. As far as I know, O’Reily does not subscribe to the idea of “free culture” and continues to publish its books (esp. manuals) under the most retrictive copyright “license” possible. And, looking through the Amazon page, I don’t see any evidence that this is published under GFDL or some sort free-er license (I think this area is much murkier than software—GFDL itself has its flaws, “Creative Commons License” is almost as bad a term as “BSD license” that does not distinguish the original 4-clause one from the others, and so on and on).

Since I’ve sworn that I won’t buy anything that’s restrictively licensed that I don’t absolutely need (scientific/academic stuff), I’m not buying this despite its relatively low cost. The inconvenient web-searching for each CSS property I need every now and then will just have to do.