Keeping Your Elements' Kids in Line with Offspring

CSS selectors are handy things. They make coding CSS easier, sure, but they can also help keep your markup clean.

Bischoff, Alex. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>CSS

CSS 2.2

There are various reasons why CSS 3 is taking so long. Many of the issues are technical and can’t be avoided; problems when testing, issues with backwards compatibility and bugs with browser implementation. However there also seems to be a lot of politics involved.

Budd, Andy. Andy Budd (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>CSS

CSS 3 Attribute Selectors

CSS attribute selectors allow us to pinpoint the values of attributes of an element and to style that element accordingly. CSS3 introduces three new selectors that can match strings against an attribute value at the beginning, the end, or anywhere within the value.This provides powerful new ways to style elements automatically that match very specific criteria. In this article, I will put these new attribute selectors in action and create some clever CSS rules that attach icons to links based on the value of the href attribute.

Schmitt, Christopher. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>CSS

Some Reasons Why Web Standards Are Difficult to Learn

It seems like the box model shouldn’t be difficult to learn, but it is. I’m not sure why, but I think it may have to do with complexity that arises when you have boxes within boxes. At that point, it becomes an exercise of adding margin here, taking away padding there, and setting margins and paddings to 0 over there. Combine that with floating and positioning: relative, absolute, fixed, and it gets hard to know where the spacing between objects comes from, even when you’re working in standards-supporting browser like Mozilla. On top of this you have the box model hack…which only complicates things further. Even browsers get the box model wrong.

Porter, Joshua. Bokardo (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>CSS

Five Ways to Instantly Write Better CSS

Sure, anyone can write CSS. Even programs are doing it for you now. But is the CSS any good? Here are five tips to start improving yours.

Davis, Trevor. NETTUTS (2009). Articles>Web Design>CSS>Standards