For me, the break-away from font tags and table-based layout came when I left an in-house intranet design environment that was totally old school – the volume of code far exceeded the content it contained and I knew there had to be a better way.
In an effort to learn CSS design, I made the decision never to use tables for anything other than tabular data and to look and learn how others did it.
I picked up one good book on the subject (which happened to be yours) and have never looked back – although I still class myself as a beginner with a lot to learn.
It’s not been an easy ride; particularly catering for varying browser support, which IE7 has not made any easier. So for me an understanding of positioning has to be key, also margin, padding and float rules.
I never got hung up on <font> tags and don’t think they are that relevant as a starting point. I guess it depends a lot on your past experience and your learning style, but for me it’s become important not to use CSS to try and replicate table-based layouts but to start from scratch and design within the CSS framework. In addition to ‘Tips, Tricks & Hacks’, I found exploring the Zen Garden one of the best learning experiences. Once you understand the design potential, font style and colour – and tables – become fairly insignificant. Which reminds me – I must get a copy of your latest…