CSS Design: Taming Lists

As early as July of 1999 I was pontificating on email lists about the virtues of style sheets. Some things never change. What has changed is how I think about CSS, and the underlying structure of (X)HTML to which it is applied. For example, I find that most pages on the web contain a menu of links in a navigation area. These are often marked up as a string of links, often in separate DIVs or paragraphs. Structurally, however, they are a list of links, and should be marked up as such. Of course the reason that we don’t mark them up in that way is that we don’t want a bullet in front of every link in our navigation area. In a previous article I outlined several techniques for using CSS to layout a web page. One of those techniques involved manipulating a list to display horizontally rather than vertically. In this article, I'll demonstrate how to use CSS to bring unwieldy lists under control. It’s time for you to tell lists how to behave, instead of letting them run wild on your web page.

Newhouse, Mark. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Web Design>CSS

Daemon Skins: Separating Presentation from Content

There's more than one way to skin a website. New ALA contributor Mark Newhouse of iBlog demonstrates creative scripting techniques that give viewers and designers the control they crave.

Newhouse, Mark. List Apart, A (2000). Design>Web Design

Practical CSS Layout Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

Think you need HTML tables to craft complex liquid layouts? Not so! In this tip-packed tutorial, Mark Newhouse shares advanced yet practical CSS techniques any working web designer can use.

Newhouse, Mark. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Web Design>CSS