In 2004 I published the first edition of The CSS Anthology with Sitepoint. The idea for the book was to take the entire CSS 2.1 specification, and come up with 101 examples to show people how to use all of the CSS that existed. I have a copy on my shelf, but recently discovered you can read it on archive.org.

Despite the personal horror of realising that book is old enough to buy alcohol in the USA, it’s fun to look at as a snapshot of a certain point in the history of the web. In 2004 many sites were still laid out with tables, several of the examples explain how to do a certain layout “without tables”. It’s also notable how I refer throughout to specific browser versions, because in 2004 a browser version would last for at least a year and usually much longer. Chrome is about to begin a two-week release cycle, we’ve come a long way.

It’s also interesting how long we had to wait for interoperable, robust ways to achieve some of the solutions. On page 328 I explain how to create coloured scrollbars, using the scrollbar-* that only worked in Internet Explorer. Over 20 years later the scrollbar-color property became Baseline Newly available.

I ultimately published four editions of The CSS Anthology. People still tell me how they learned CSS from that book, something which I find amazing and wonderful. I often wonder what a modern version of that book would look like, and how big it would need to be to attempt to cover all of CSS in 2026!