Colleen Jones’s book, Clout: the ART and SCIENCE of INFLUENTIAL WEB CONTENT, faces this problem from the outset. Right there on the cover it straddles the fence of condescension. Its subtitle invokes the renaissance and dares to use the word “influential”: Influence being the characteristic sought by all who write content for the web but never mentioned explicitly for fear of being judged manipulative.

In that way, Jones’s title teaches us the first lesson the book has to offer: Sometimes it’s better to be explicit than pretend to be something you’re not.

Inside the book, the lessons continue and it’s quickly evident that these are lessons for the less informed content creators. The reader is eased into the concept of content strategy. For the uninformed it’s an introduction while the informed are given some ready-formed arguments to help sell the idea of content strategy to those who need to buy it.

Jones’s book is a primer for content strategy, focussing more on creating content with a taste for the planning and analytics that go along with other parts of the strategy. She describes in appropriate detail why creating the right sort of content is difficult and how it’s a job that is never really finished.

Important for any introductory book, and successfully achieved by Jones, is informing the reader that there is still so much to learn before becoming an expert. Throughout Clout, she refers to the other leaders in content strategy like Ann Rockley, Kristina Halvorson and Erin Kissane, and she prescribes further reading into areas of marketing, planning, heuristics and analytics.

In Australia we’re particularly bad at explicit instruction. The title garnered some judgement amongst colleagues and judgemental looks on public transport. Our attitude is often “what could a book tell me about what I do?” The answer is: “A lot. Now, shut up and read.”

Clout puts the concept of content strategy into perspective for those who do it on a daily basis and those who are new to the idea. For those of us who work in the field, it serves as a reminder of what it is we’re trying to achieve and who to talk about it to those who have no idea.

EYKACIW! begins by explaining how today’s web developer has hacked CSS to do things it was never designed to do, in much the same way that we hacked HTML tables in the heady days of the 1990s; floats, faux columns, negative margins, positioning, and, several more tricks now used as a second nature all get dishonourable mentions.

I’m not so sure

EYKACIW! points out that there is no CSS table equivalent of the col- and rowspan attributes in an HTML table, a method is detailed in the book to emulate these features with absolute positioning (also available on Kevin Yank’s Sitepoint blog). The method detailed brings to mind the very hacks we’re being discouraged from using.

Another problem I can foresee is that CSS tables will increase, rather than decrease, the amount div bloat required for a typical layout; replacing <table><tr><td> in an old fashioned HTML table layout with <div><div><div> – these otherwise redundant divs aren’t necessary for a basic layout, but seem to be inevitable for layouts requiring nested tables.

Hold your horses (and other clich’s)

These are my initial reactions to reading about CSS tables, in some ways it reminds me of my reaction – when learning CSS – to reading that the width of an element doesn’t include the padding or the border; my reaction back then was ‘but that’s stupid’, now it’s just second nature and the concept of including the padding and border is foreign.

EYKACIW! is about CSS tables, with an introduction to other CSS3 layout modules in the final chapter, modules that aren’t implemented in any browser – such as the grid positioning module and the template layout module – these modules excite me, CSS tables seem to require a different set of hacks, and – to paraphrase Regurgitator – I like your old hacks better than your new hacks.

It’s possible that the problem with Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong! is that it was released too early; maybe it would have been better timed for a couple of years down the track when these new modules are in our browsers; regardless the book will cause a lot of discussion within the developer community about the direction in which CSS3 should go, and that’s only a good thing.