Table of Contents for

CSS Secrets

Words of thanks

This book would not have been possible without the help and support of a number of fantastic people, to whom I’m deeply grateful. A big, heartfelt thank you goes to:

• All those who supported my work over the years, otherwise I wouldn’t have found myself in the position of writing a book in the first place. To readers of my blog (lea.verou.me), Twitter (twitter.com/leaverou), and elsewhere, and even more to you, dear reader of my first book! To everyone who has used my open source work (github.com/leaverou) and even more to those who contributed.

• All the conference organizers who have invited me for talks and workshops over the years, especially to Damian Wielgosik and Paweł Czerski who first believed in me and invited me to the inaugural Front-Trends conference in 2010. And to Vasilis Vassalos who trusted me to design a web development course for Athens University of Economics and Business back in 2010, as all these experiences taught me a great deal about teaching (and a technical book is basically teaching).

• Everyone in the CSS Working Group who voted to bring me on as an Invited Expert, which has transformed my perspective on web technologies in general and on CSS in particular.

• My editors, Mary Treseler and Meg Foley, who gave me control over the entire process and have been incredibly patient with me when I missed deadlines (which happened more often than I’d care to admit).

• My production editor, Kara Ebrahim, who spent copious amounts of time fixing layout issues and manually compensating for CSS rendering bugs and limitations in the PDF renderer used for this book.

• My technical editors: Elika Etemad, Tab Atkins, Ryan Seddon, Elisabeth Robson, Ben Henick, Robin Nixon, and Hugo Giraudel. They not only helped me correct factual mistakes, but also provided invaluable feedback regarding the understandability of the prose.

• Eric Meyer, who I still cannot believe agreed to write a Foreword for my book.

• My research advisor, David Karger, who was extremely understanding when I arrived at MIT without having finished this book, which was supposed to be done long before then. Without his continued patience, the fate of this book would have been bleak.

• My dad, Miltiades Komvoutis, who taught me art and aesthetics very early on. Without him, I would probably have zero interest in design and CSS, and this book would have been about something else, like C++ or kernel programming.

• My uncle/second dad, Stratis Veros, and his lovely wife, Maria Brere, who put up with me when I was at my most cranky while writing this book. Also to their kids, Leonie and Phoebe, who are the cutest little girls in the world and without whom, this book would have finished around a month earlier.

• My incredible late mother, Maria Verou, to whom this book is dedicated. For the 27 years our lives overlapped, she was my best friend and biggest supporter. Her own life was a huge inspiration: she moved to the other side of the world to do postgraduate research at MIT in the 1970s, a time when most women in Greece barely made it to college, and got her degree with distinction. She taught me ambition, kindness, integrity, independence, open-mindedness. But most importantly, she taught me to not take life too seriously. I miss her sorely.