CSS

Modern CSS Layouts: The Essential Characteristics

Now is an exciting time to be creating CSS layouts. After years of what felt like the same old techniques for the same old browsers, we’re finally seeing browsers implement CSS 3, HTML 5 and other technologies that give us cool new tools and tricks for our designs. But all of this change can be stressful, too. How do you keep up with all of the new techniques and make sure your Web pages look great on the increasing number of browsers and devices out there? In part 1 of this article, you’ll learn the five essential characteristics of successful modern CSS websites.

Fifty Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools

Below, we present 50 extremely useful CSS tools, generators, templates and resources. We did not include “traditional” CSS tools, such as Firebug or the Web Developer extension, but tried to focus on rather unknown tools that are definitely worth a look. Some tools are new and some are old, but hopefully everybody will find a couple of new useful or at least inspiring tools.

Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding

Sometimes being a web-developer is just damn hard. Particularly coding is often responsible for slowing down our workflow, reducing the quality of our work and sleepless nights with pizza and coffee laying around the laptop. Reason: with a number of incompatibility issues and quite creative rendering engines it sometimes takes too much time to find a workaround for some problem without addressing browsers with quirky hacks. And that’s where ready-to-use solutions developed by other designers come in handy. In this post we present 50 new CSS-techniques, ideas and ready-to-use solutions for effective coding.

CSS: Techniques, Tutorials, Layouts

Since web-development is a quite dynamic field nowadays, new techniques are being developed and updated all the time. A primary example are CSS-related techniques, which emerge almost every day and offer more possibilities for fellows web-developers. We keep an eye on the recent developments and collect new ideas and methods for our readers. A “fresh” round-up of the “fresh” CSS techniques, tutorials and layouts.

Web Based, The

Our best CSS gallery is a showcase of well designed websites by the best web designers and web developers around the world, css gallery help you to get inspirations for the web site projects as well as to learn and see what can be achieved through pure css layouts and web standard.

Stop Hacking, or be Stopped

CSS has experienced a colourful and unusual history. From historic slow adoption to the current slow rate of development, ugly hacks have meant filling in the gaps is par for the course. But now that Internet Explorer 7 is looming, we're getting ready to deal with the first really major upgrade to a browser's rendering engine since we've started using CSS-based layouts in earnest.

Using JavaScript to Style Active Navigation Elements

I’m all about efficiency when I’m writing web code. Any time I find myself writing the same functionality more than once or twice, I try to consider whether my repeated code could be wrapped into a function of some sort. Navigation is often one of those areas where I try to improve my efficiency.

Why Stylesheet Abstraction Matters

CSS is simple. You assign style primitives to elements and some of those primitives cascade down to the elements contained within. I get it. It’s simple to understand. But CSS is not simple to use or maintain. It’s time for stylesheets to evolve so that we can take web design to the next level.

Guide to CSS Font Stacks: Techniques and Resources

CSS Font stacks are one of those things that elude a lot of designers. Many stick to the basic stacks Dreamweaver auto-recommends or go even more basic by just specifying a single web-safe font. But doing either of those things means you’re missing out on some great typography options. Font stacks can make it possible to show at least some of your visitors your site’s typography exactly the way you intend without showing everyone else a default font. Read on for more information on using and creating effective font stacks with CSS.

Better CSS Font Stacks

You want to use Gill Sans? Go right ahead. Nothing should stop you. Font stacks are prioritized lists of fonts, defined in the CSS font-family attribute, that the browser will cycle through until it finds a font that is installed on the user’s system. This means that you can use Gill Sans, and if your users don’t have it, you can give them an adequate substitute that will not diminish their experience.

Creating Auto-line Numbered Code Blocks with CSS Using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005: A Help Authoring Guide

This Fast Track tutorial demonstrates how to create automatic line numbering in a code block.

Building Accessible Static Navigation with C.S.S. and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005: A Help Authoring Guide

There are times when we need to build a navigation tree stucture to accomodate a small document collection. There is no need to have this nav list expand or contract, so employing a Behavior layer (unobtrusive DOM/JavaScript) is not appropriate.

Adventures in Web 3.0: Part 2 - CSS 3

Unlike its predecessors, CSS3 is not a single, monolithic spec, but a collection of modules all of which are at different levels of completeness. For instance the selectors module became a candidate recommendation in November 2001 and is already widely supported. In this post I'm going to be experimenting with the Backgrounds and Borders module and the Transitions module, mostly because the recent Firefox 3.5 release includes improved (but still experimental) support for some of the more interesting bits of it.

Adventures in Web 3.0: Part 3 - More CSS 3

There are some new CSS3 features supported in the latest Chrome release and Firefox alpha which make this worth a second post. This time I'm going to focus on background sizing, CSS gradients and RGBA colours.

Twelve Really Useful CSS3 Tips And Techniques

CSS 3 no doubt is amazing. I have been using slight bits of it in some of my other web projects, and i am more than pleased with it. Its simplicity runs so well with its advanced features such as rounded corner rendering and font file reading. Rounded up here are my 12 favorite tutorials to help you learn many of CSS 3’s new and exciting features very quickly.

Beautiful Fonts with @font-face

While Firefox 3.0 improved typographic rendering by introducing support for kerning, ligatures, and multiple weights along with support for rendering complex scripts, authors are still limited to using commonly available fonts in their designs. Firefox 3.5 removes this restriction by introducing support for the CSS @font-face rule, a way of linking to TrueType and OpenType fonts just as code and images are linked to today. Using @font-face for font linking is relatively straightforward. Within a stylesheet, each @font-face rule defines a family name to be used, the font resource to be loaded, and the style characteristics of a given face such as whether it’s bold or italic. Firefox 3.5 only downloads the fonts as needed, so a stylesheet can list a whole set of fonts of which only a select few will actually be used.

Font in your Face

So, you are a web designer going about your daily life, struggling with IE 6, huffing about CSS 3/HTML 5, berating your designers for not using web-safe fonts, and there comes a brick hurling towards you named @font-face. You are dumbstruck. You have no idea what hit you. Everyone is asking about it, and you pretend to know about it. Then you quickly google for it and are hit with even more bricks. I was one such web designer and I spent 4 days in agony, learning about @font-face. I wrote this down, so that no other web designer has to face this torture anymore. So here is the “A to Z” of what @font-face means now and what it will mean for the future of web design.

Browser Compatibility Table

A list of various CSS rules and their compatibility with common browsers and operating systems. With a quick glance, the designer or developer can note which CSS properties should be used or avoided. The table also offers an interactive feature that highlights the row your cursor is on. This makes pinpointing the compatibility of a specific CSS property much easier.

CSS Cheat Sheet

This cheat sheet is designed to not only be a quick reference for CSS properties but also to give you a good feel for how each property should be used. It contains all of the properties in the CSS2 specification including a description of the syntax of each one.

Experiments with Cascading Style Sheets

I have created this site in the hope that it will help newcomers to CSS and show old hands that it is more than just a mechanism for styling your documents. It is oh so much more.

Crash Course: YUI Grids CSS

The Yahoo User Interface Library is a rather extensive set of JavaScript tools for developers. Often left unnoticed are a few other useful components of the library that will speed up your coding: some CSS libraries. I’d like to give you a quick tour of YUI Grids CSS library.

Eleven Syntax Highlighters To Beautify Code Presentation

When sharing codes on a website, even they are wrapped with CODE tags or styled differently, it is always a challenge to read them without syntax highlighting. There are various syntax highlighters which can format the codes & color them appropriately according to the languages used. Whether it is a HTML page or runs on PHP, Ruby, Python, ASP, there is a suitable syntax highlighter. Here is a collection of 11 Syntax Highlighters To Beautify Code Presentation.

CSS Layout Generator

This generator will create a fluid or fixed width floated column layout, with up to 3 columns and with header and footer. Values can be specified in either pixels, ems or percentages.

Grid Designer 2

This web-based service will develop a CSS file (with appropriate resets) for a multi-column web design to suit your preferences.

Introducing CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a technology used primarily within Web publishing that aims to manage the presentation of HTML pages. CSS is essentially a styling language. CSS code instructs a browser how to "render" (display) HTML elements.

A Simple jQuery Stylesheet Switcher

There are lots of reasons you might want to offer your users more than one CSS file for your website. But whatever the reason, it’s amazingly easy to create a function that swaps between multiple stylesheets using a few lines of jQuery.

Fifteen Surefire Ways to Break Your CSS

But as silly as it may seem, some of the biggest CSS blunders stem from the simplest of errors. Knowing what some of those errors are and remembering to look for them can save you hours of wasted labor. Here are fifteen ways I’ve found to break my CSS for sure — and fifteen things I always look for whenever I have a problem in my code.

Build Custom Frameworks Easily with CSS Classes

Generally speaking, I consider full-fledged CSS frameworks to be overkill on all but the most absolutely complex projects or, on the other end of the spectrum, rapid proof-of-concept prototyping. Most people only use a few of the classes that any one CSS framework provides, but then still require their users to download the entire, and largely unused, stylesheet. However, I still think that the foundation on which CSS frameworks are built — the concept of using classes to simplify layout and standardize design across similar elements — is very much worth investigation.

Styling Form Controls with CSS, Revisited

Attempting to use CSS to make form controls look similar across browsers and operating systems in an exercise in futility. It simply cannot be done. Because of all this I spent way too much time creating a total of 224 screenshots showing the effects of various CSS rules applied to form controls.

CSS Globe

CSSG is a community driven site dedicated to web standard run by web standards designer and developer Alen Grakalic. The site consists of two main sections: exclusive articles (mostly written by me) and community news sections.

Elastic Design

It can be difficult to move from a static, pixel-based design approach to an elastic, relative method. Properly implemented, however, elastic design can be a viable option that enhances usability and accessibility without mandating design sacrifices.

Relatively Absolute

Positioning is perhaps one of the most misunderstood parts of CSS 2. Let us look a little closer at how it works.

Bezględnie Względny

Pozycjonowanie z kolei jest jednym z najczęściej mylnie interpretowanych aspektów wersji 2 CSS. Przyjrzyjmy się zatem nieco bliżej temu, jak ono działa.

CSS Hizalama

Hizalama ise CSS 2’nin belki de en yanlış anlaşılmış bölümlerinden biridir. Şimdi nasıl çalıştıklarına biraz daha yakından bakalım.

Liquid Layouts the Easy Way

This article explains one method of achieving a successful liquid layout as well as providing basic definitions of liquid, fixed-width and em-driven layouts.

Fluid Grids

Fluid layouts are an undervalued commodity in web design. They put control of our designs firmly in the hands of our users and their browsing habits. They’ve also utterly failed to seize the imagination of web designers.

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.

RESTful CSS

In this article I will propose a new method for organizing CSS that better maps to how popular web application frameworks are built; and I’ll also provide some helpful code to make this easy to accomplish. The examples I use are based on Ruby on Rails, but the concepts should be easily transferrable to other MVC frameworks.

Return of the Mobile Style Sheet

If you’re just getting started with mobile design, you may face a number of hurdles, including the cost or technical challenge of designing and maintaining a second site—or a simple lack of understanding of how people on the go might use your site. This article discusses a first step toward mobile design that uses CSS to maximize interoperability across platforms. By starting simple, you can provide a decent initial experience, solicit user feedback, and iterate toward a more mobile-friendly design.

Printing the Web

For some websites the user experience already extends onto paper, like it or not. Ignoring this may result in lower overall user satisfaction. Consider the following factors when designing web pages that will be printed.

Internet Explorer Bug Fix: Disappearing Positioned Anchors

Internet Explorer does not respect the height and width properties of block-level, absolutely positioned anchor tags if they contain no content (or if that content has been moved or removed). So what’s the workaround? Well, there are several.

Accessible CSS Forms: Using CSS to Create a Two-Column Layout

Websites have become less accessible and more complex over time according to recent studies. Learn how to buck the trend by creating fast, accessible CSS forms that work with modern browsers and gracefully degrade.

Using CSS to Float a Masthead

Learn how to create that 'bookend' look with lists and CSS positioning. This CSS-layout technique saves a significant amount of XHTML code over tables.

First Impressions Count in Website Design

Web designers have as little as 50 milliseconds to capture the interest of potential customers. Through the halo effect, first impressions can influence subsequent judgments of website credibility and buying decisions.

CSS Overlays: Using CSS Positioning to Overlay Web Objects

An overlay is when one web object overlaps another. Overlays are often used to highlight or draw attention to important items on websites to raise conversion rates. This article shows how use CSS positioning to avoid slicing and dicing your overlays and assembling with tables. Along the way we'll look at the workarounds we used to make the technique work with different browsers (most importantly IE5.x Mac and Safari).

Text/Typographical Layout

The default setting in browsers is to align text to the left. Text can also be aligned to the right, in the center, or justified (aligned on both the left and the right sides). Although some people like the look of justified text, studies have routinely shown that left-aligned text is the easiest to read. Some Asian and Middle Eastern languages are notable exceptions to this rule, since the normal text direction in these languages may be vertical from top to bottom or horizontal from right to left. For English and other left-top-right languages, the best practice is to align text on the left.

Relative Sizing and Images

Few people realize that with today's modern browsers, relative sizing can in fact be added to images as well as text elements on your web page. Making the image scale with the text may aid in accessibility, despite the degradation of quality.

CSS in Action: Invisible Content Just for Screen Reader Users

Most of the techniques for making web content accessible to screen readers are invisible to visual users. Alternative (alt) text, table header tags, table summaries, and form tags are examples of techniques that make a big difference for screen reader users, but which have little or no impact on the visual appearance of the web content. Every once in a while, though, web designers confront situations in which the addition of accessible markup does have an impact on the visual layout. In some cases, this visual impact can decrease the usability of the content for visual users. In other cases, designers simply want to provide a more pleasing layout or appearance that would be compromised by including all of the text in a semantically correct format.

The Beauty and Business of CSS

Building designs with CSS is no longer a fringe activity practiced by standards geeks and early-adopters. Creative pioneers and highly skilled designers are bringing CSS to the mainstream. The explosion in popularity is ushering in a new wave of possibilities for web design. CSS provides greater design control, allows more flexibility, and enables sites to become attractive, accessible, and faster-loading, all at the same time.

Pushing Your Limits (and Other Secrets of Designing with CSS)

What do you do when you feel like you’ve hit a brick wall? When it seems your creativity is limited by how much CSS you know how to beat into submission? How do you resist the temptation to give it all up and go back to tables? Why does it feel like the pros are constantly inventing new techniques each week, when you’re still struggling to keep up with the stuff you read about last year? Understanding how and where CSS fits into the design process is key to knowing how to push your own limits. Reviewing the principles of existing techniques — and learning why or how they came about — can extend your capabilities and help you gain confidence in solving future problems on your own.

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.

Screen Readers and CSS Layout

Screen readers are mostly mystical devices for almost all of us. Few of us actually own them. They’re incredibly expensive. Fewer yet know how to use them well, what their capabilities are, or how they actually work. Is it little wonder then, that big names in our web design world question how screen readers handle modern layout techniques? Not at all. The two gurus quoted below have other strengths, and specialities. They probably haven’t used a screen reader in ages.

CSS Link Styles

One of the easiest, yet most interactive, elements you can add to your Web site is dynamic link text—links that change their appearance once the user puts their cursor over them.

Horizontally Center Layout in CSS

A good way of dealing with users on different screen resolutions is to center your Web design horizontally. This will ensure, regardless of the user’s screen size, that there is an equal amount of space to the left and right of the main design area, producing an overall "fuller" look to your site.

Fifty Beautiful Blog Designs

In the showcase below we present 50 beautiful blog designs that literally stand out — either through their layout or through their design or through their attention to little details. Below you’ll find a variety of designs: clean designs, grunge, retro, graphics-heavy designs etc. Most designs presented below risk unusual approaches in the choice of design and content presentation. That’s what makes them different. Hopefully you will find some creative ideas which you can develop further in your further projects.

CSS SiteMap

Recently I needed to crank out a visual sitemap (or is it a directory tree?) from a rather large site and had a devil of a time finding decent tools to help. Everything I found in my search was either too costly, too complicated, or too unattractive for my purposes. A case in point was CSS Diagrams—a damn fine piece of work (and free), but it really didn’t suit my needs. But it did give me an idea. Why not roll my own sitemap diagram in HTML and CSS?

Simple CSS: Creating More Readable Text

Typography is an important part of Web design. Just like in the print world, your content needs to be readable to your viewers for it to be of any use. As a general rule, you want to make sure your Web site provides as little resistance as possible to the user, and the easier your site is to read, the better. CSS provides three very useful properties to enhance the readability of your site: font , line-height , and letter-spacing.

CSS Step Menu

I recently worked on a web application that required a step menu (AKA wizard menu). This menu has a varying amount of steps, dependent upon the type of user accessing the application. Because of that requirement, I needed to write a CSS menu that could easily be changed from 5 steps to 4, 3, or 2 steps. Since the web is full of CSS menus, I thought one of this sort would be rather easy to find. I was wrong. I never really found a good example of one. So, for those of you who have looked and come up short, here’s an example.

Better Ordered Lists (Using Simple PHP and CSS)

Ordered lists are boring! Sure you can apply background images and do quite a bit of sprucing up to a regular ordered list, but you just don’t get enough control over the number itself. Here is an example where you ditch the traditional ordered list and create your own!

CSS Speech Bubbles

Easy to customize speech bubbles coded in valid XHTML and CSS.

Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong

Digital Web running a provocative article on CSS techniques? Shurely shome mishtake! In this extract from the forthcoming Sitepoint book of the same name, this article explains how you can use tables for layout in modern web design with a clean conscience.

Smart CSS Ain’t Always Sexy CSS

In the endless struggle to truly separate presentation from structure, have we lost our way? Are the old-school advocates for CSS still pushing radical and unnecessary thinking to try and justify the mass-adoption of a technology that has already been massively adopted? Smart CSS isn’t always sexy CSS… and lets face it, when working with real world applications, smart is where you want to be.

CSS Not ([hacks])

As any web developer worth his salt will know, browsers can differ in their interpretation of CSS rules and properties. One way of coping with this headache is to use various hacks; they might (in some cases) be invalid CSS, but they force browsers to read only certain parts of your CSS and render your page or web site as close to how you intended as possible. CSS hacks are one of the common ways to send specific instructions to different browsers, be it to solve min-width issues or box model interpretations.

Fancy Form Design Using CSS

Forms. Is there any other word that strikes as much fear into the hearts of grown web designers? There's also an improperly held belief that the only way you can guarantee that a form displays properly is by using tables. All of the code reproduced here for forms is standards-based, semantic markup, so you've got no excuse for relying on tables now!

Building Accessible Static Navigation with CSS

When building a navigation menu for a web site, steps should be taken to ensure that it is accessible, and degrades gracefully in older browsers with lesser CSS support. In this article we will explore one such implementation. The navigation menu you see in this example is built with valid, semantic HTML and CSS - no JavaScript is involved, as I felt this was unnecessary. The static (non-expanding/collapsing) nature of the example suits a web site comprised of twenty or less target pages.

Automatic Numbering With CSS Counters

When writing documents, it is often useful to number sections and have a table of contents. You can number these by hand, directly in the markup, but this can be time consuming if the order changes and you have to edit all the numbers. CSS2.1 gives us a automated way to generate numbers using CSS counters, and this article will walk you through how to use them.

Zebra Striping Tables with CSS3

With the advent of CSS3’s nth-child selector, we are able to target multiple elements in a document by creating a "counter" that skips over specified children in the document tree. This allows us, specifically, to style only the odd or even rows of a table. This article details how to use nth-child sucessfully.

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.

Grid Design Basics: Grids for Web Page Layouts

Since tables were co-opted for layout purposes, columns have become key to many Web design layouts, and this thinking continued when CSS took over from tables (at least in the minds of savvy designers) for Web-page presentation. However, other fields of layout design don’t think in arbitrary columns, they work with grids, and these form the basis for the structure of page designs. This article will provide the lowdown on grid design for Web pages.

Setting Web Type to a Baseline Grid

This article covers the basics of baseline grids—defined grid areas within which content is placed—and how they can be applied effectively to the web medium. In print, baseline grids are almost mandatory. They ensure the bottom of each line of text—its baseline—aligns with a vertical grid, akin to writing on a ruled piece of paper. With books, this means text is always in the same position on the page. This ensures the gaps between lines of text aren’t “filled” with content showing through from the reverse of any page, thereby making the text easier to read. This advantage isn’t relevant for Web design, but the other major advantage—maintaining a vertical rhythm—is.

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.

Formal Weirdness

Explains some of the technical reasons for form controls being so hard to style consistently across platforms with CSS. Also asks a lot of good questions related to how various CSS properties should affect form controls if browsers would let them.

Creating Bulletproof Graphic Link Buttons With CSS

A CSS problem I have been wrestling with lately is how to create a bulletproof shrinkwrapping graphic button. By that I mean an image-based button that will expand and contract to fit the amount of text it contains. It is a very useful technique for CMS-driven sites that allow the client to change the text that is displayed on buttons, as well as for multilingual sites.

Thirty-Five Designers x 5 Questions

175 professional suggestions, tips and ideas from some of the best web-developers all around the world.

Unobtrusive and Keyboard Accessible Connected Select Boxes

Any web developer who has created a reasonably complex form is probably aware of the concept of multiple select elements that are connected – choosing something from one select box either makes a new select box appear or changes the options of one that is already visible.

Internet Explorer and the CSS Box Model

One of the differences between Internet Explorer and standards compliant Web browsers that cause a lot of trouble for CSS beginners is the CSS box model. Since the box model is what browsers use to calculate an element’s total width and height, it is quite understandable that different browsers producing different results can be both confusing and frustrating.

Specify a Maximum Width for Em-Based Layouts

One technique that can easily make reading a site a lot more uncomfortable is using an elastic, or em-based, layout such as the one I use here (and talk about a bit more in detail in Fixed or fluid width? Elastic!) without specifying a maximum width in another unit.

Choose an Accessible Image Replacement Method

The technique of using CSS to replace normal HTML text, mostly for headings, with a background image in order to achieve a particular look has been talked about many, many times since early 2003.Several different image replacement methods have been proposed, each with their pros and cons. Some methods create accessibility problems, while others place restrictions on the type of image you can use or force you to use extraneous markup. No method that I am aware of is perfect.

Screen Readers Sometimes Ignore display:none

Using display:none does not always hide content from screen readers like JAWS and Window-Eyes, but there is a workaround.

Spruce Up Your Search Box with CSS and a Background Image

Very few designers appreciate the aesthetic of a text input field, and styling form fields cross-browser on any Web site can be a tedious and frustrating experience. The compromise typically involves applying a simple colored border and background to the fields. I think this is the right approach for Web sites and applications that are form field intensive, but the search box plays a special role in the design, and it deserves a little more attention.

The Five Things Every CSS Beginner Must Know

Being a CSS beginner is difficult because you never know where to start the learning process. If you pose the question to any forum, you will get a myriad of answers, some good, but mostly, not so good. The worst is when you’re instructed to read the W3C documentation. That’s like asking a pilot in training to read the mechanic’s manual for the propeller.

CSSnewbie

Our mission is to help the beginning to intermediate web designer master the subtleties of CSS by offering CSS tutorials, tips, and techniques.

Five Great Uses for the CSS Display Property

The display property is a bit of an unheralded workhorse in the CSS world. Even though the list of theoretical display property values is quite long, only three of them ever see any use (primarily due to poor browser support on the others): inline, block, and none.

Hiding Content in Your RSS Feed

I’ve been doing a bit of research lately on creating RSS-only content for my website – that is, content that shows up in my RSS feed and nowhere else.

Six Ways to Style Blockquotes

Blockquotes do have some styling by default. Most browsers will indent the text in a blockquote tag, which helps the user recognize that the text is different somehow. But who’s to say that we need to stop there? Here are six different ways you could style your blockquotes using CSS.

On Calendars, Lists, Tables and Semantics

I first came up with the idea for a list-based calendar at my 8-5 job as I was leafing through my appointments in Outlook. I thought about how useful it was to be able to switch between the month view, to the 7-day, to the 5-day, and so on as necessity dictated.

Using Definition Lists: Question and Answer Formatting

There are two big differences between unordered lists and definition lists. One, there are two different elements that belong in a definition list: dt’s & dd’s. In unordered lists, all you have is li’s. Two, the only default styling applied to definition lists is a bit of a left-margin to the dd elements — no bullets or other strange positioning to fight. Having two different tags to work with is what makes definition lists valuable.

Five Ways to Set Your Unordered Lists Apart

Unordered lists are one of the most pervasive elements on the web, probably just behind paragraphs and hyperlinks in terms of their bunny-like abundance. And for good reason: bulleted (i.e., unordered) lists are a great way to convey a bunch of related information in a rather small space, which is often the preferred way to read on (and thus, write for) the internet.

Understanding the CSS Box Model

A fundamental understanding of the CSS box model is essential to gaining a basic understanding of CSS in general. The good news is, if you can pack a box in real life, you can understand the CSS box model. And if you can’t pack a box in real life due to some traumatic physical injury, you shouldn’t have much of a problem, either. Also, I’m sorry about bringing up the whole box thing.

CSS Attribute Selectors: Built-In Classes

By using attribute selectors in your CSS, you’re able to target elements with specific attributes, or even specific values within those attributes. When using attribute selectors, the attribute is contained within [brackets], just like how .classes have a leading period, or #ids have a leading pound sign.

Writing CSS Shorthand

Writing Cascading Style Sheets saves you time and bandwidth in the long run by removing all of the presentational elements and attributes from your web pages and moving them into a separate document. But sometimes that CSS document itself can get pretty long as well. So what do you do then?

Using the CSS @import Rule

Even the most complex style sheet starts out with a single rule. But when you’re working on a particularly massive and complex website, over time your style sheet will inevitably start to reflect the site’s size and complexity. And even if you employ every trick of organizing your CSS in the book, you might find that the sheer size of the file is simply overwhelming. At that point, you might want to consider splitting your style sheet up into several smaller CSS files. That’s when the @import rule can come in quite handy.

Five Steps to a More Organized Style Sheet

One of the nice things about languages like CSS is that you don’t have to write them in any specific way. For example, you could place all the CSS rules for your entire website on a single line of text, and assuming you had some brackets and semicolons stuck in there at appropriate intervals, your website would render without a hitch.

Seven Tips for Great Print Style Sheets

CSS doesn’t apply exclusively to the Realm of the Screen. You can also write style sheets that apply to the medium that first spawned them – print. This can be a very useful trick, since people read on the screen very differently than they read print documents. So here are a few tips for creating a print style sheet that will ensure your website is user-friendly, regardless of the medium it ends up in.

Book-Style Chapter Introductions Using Pure CSS

Today’s tutorial will show you how easy it is to create book-style chapter (article, whatever) introductions using nothing but pure CSS — no XHTML was harmed in the making of this tutorial. We’ll use two types of selectors which I haven’t talked about yet here: adjacent sibling selectors and pseudo-element selectors. I’ll explain each type briefly before we get started.

How to Write a CSS Rule

The syntax of CSS is extremely simple to understand. A CSS file is essentially a list of rules. And each of those rules is comprised of two basic parts: a selector and one or more declarations. Each declaration also consists of two parts: a property and a value.

What Is This CSS Thing, Anyway?

So you’ve been hanging around the web gurus long enough to know that 'CSS' is something big and important in the web design world. You might even know that it has something to do with making pages pretty, or more Web 2.0, or something like that. And that’s true (to an extent). But what does CSS really mean?

Seven Tips for Replacing the Font Tag

Replacing font tags with semantic code and CSS isn’t as terribly difficult as it might seem at the outset. To help you along your way, here are a few tips on how to tackle the project.

Combating Classitis with Cascades and Sequential Selectors

There is a disease out there in the CSS world. It can afflict anything from the meanest weblog (or the nicest ones too, I suppose) to the greatest of corporate websites. It’s called Classitis, and I’ve encountered it far too often in my professional work. Perhaps you’ve seen it too.

The Four CSS Rules of Multiplicity

One quick and easy way to keep your CSS clean and well-structured is to remember (what I’m going to title) the four CSS Rules of Multiplicity. They are: Multiple declarations can live in a single rule. Multiple selectors can preface the same rule set. Multiple rules can be applied to the same selector. Multiple classes can be set on a single element.

When to Use CSS IDs and Classes

There are three different ways in CSS you can dictate which elements you want to style. Each way is useful for a specific set of purposes, but by using all three together, you can really harness the cascading power of style sheets. The three methods of describing objects on a page are by their tag name, their ID, or their class.

Print-Friendly Images and Logos with CSS

In certain instances, not everyone views every portion of your website online: eventually, someone is going to print parts of it. In many cases, this is perfectly fine: if you have a print style sheet that takes care of your worst sins, your website should look okay. But one area where it may still look lackluster is the images.

Five CSSriffic Treatments to Make Your Images Stand Out

Sometimes just having images isn’t enough. Sometimes we need a little help to make our outstanding images truly stand out. And that’s where CSS can help. Here are five things you can do, using CSS, to make the most of your images.

Easy CSS Dropdown Menus

Attractive dropdown menus have long been the realm of Flash developers and advanced JavaScript gurus. But that needn’t be the case. This tutorial will walk you through developing a clean, semantic dropdown menu using XHTML and CSS that works in all modern browsers!

Show/Hide Content with CSS and JavaScript

Today’s tutorial will show you how to hide away extra bits of content using CSS and JavaScript, to be revealed at the click of a button. This is a great technique, because displaying the additional content doesn’t require a refresh or navigation to a new page and all your content is still visible to search engine bots that don’t pay any attention to CSS or JavaScript.

Bug Fix: IE Double Margin Float Bug

The double-margin float bug -- an Internet Explorer-exclusive bug wherein an element that is floated – and given a margin in the same direction as the float – ends up with twice the specified margin size -- has been a source of irritation for CSS-loving web designers for years. While an easy (if mysterious) fix has been known for quite some time now, it occurs to me that perhaps not everyone knows about it. So I thought it couldn’t hurt to toss another explanation out there.

Horizontal CSS Dropdown Menus

Last week, CSSnewbie reader Andrea Pluhar wrote in with an interesting problem: she wanted to use CSS dropdown menus like the ones we featured last week on a website that she was building, but the design called for the submenu to be arranged horizontally, not vertically. She sent me a mockup of what she was after (excerpted above) and wondered if there was a way to accomplish this effect using CSS.

Tab-Based Navigation in Six (or Seven) Easy Steps

Navigation bars are the signposts of the web world: we take them for granted because of their ubiquity, but we’d all have a much harder time getting around without them. On most websites, nav bars hold a position of honor near the very top of the page, meaning they’re one of the first things your users see upon entering your site. As such, there’s a lot of pressure on navigation bars to look clean, act sophisticated, and ply the client’s wife with small talk and Manhattans while you close the deal.

Style Your Links With CSS

With CSS, links don’t have to be ugly. They can look pretty much however you want. Here are a few of the things you can do to make your links stand out without sticking out.

Why Doesn’t My CSS Work? Five Quick Fixes

You’ve been working on your brand new, beautifully cascading style sheet for most of the day. You save your work, load it into a browser, and… what the heck?! Nothing’s working right! You know you didn’t make any huge errors in your code, but something is obviously wrong. We’ve all been there before. But instead of wasting endless hours debugging your code, here are a few very simple things you can check in your CSS before you start pulling out your hair.

CSS Sprites2: It's JavaScript Time

In 2004, Dave Shea took the CSS rollover where it had never gone before. Now he takes it further still—with a little help from jQuery. Say hello to hover animations that respond to a user’s behavior in ways standards-based sites never could before.

Conditional-CSS

Conditional-CSS allows you to write maintainable CSS with conditional logic to target specific CSS statements at both individual browsers and groups of browsers.

Creating Killer Forms with CSS

So you’ve been to about a million websites at this point in your cyber life. There’s a little bit of everything in the online jungle, with every different imaginable style, color, and layout. Everyone is trying to be different, trying to separate themselves from the pack. So why is it that nearly every website, from the coolest of the cool to the worst of the worst, seem to still be using the same, ugly form fields that are default. Well, that’s about to change, at least on your website. I’m going to give you some quick and easy tips to spice up your form fields and set your website apart from the rest.

The CSS Resource Guide: Getting Rid of Table Layouts Forever

If you are still using table based layouts for your web developement projects, you’re getting left behind. CSS/XHMTL design layouts are not only en vouge, they are imperative. And they are much easier to use than you think! So you don’t know where to start? Here’s 5 can’t miss CSS resources for every designer and developer.

Twelve Great CSS Resources: From Inspiration to Implementation

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which is a style sheet language used to present a document written in a markup language. CSS is often used to update and change web sites written in HTML or XHTML. These are a few sites that have a excellent start up information to help someone use CSS.

Twenty Best Simple and Inspirational CSS Web Designs

After looking through hundreds, maybe even thousands of websites, I’ve compiled the top 20 CSS websites for clean and simple design. What do these designs have in common? They all have clean simple interfaces and remain uncluttered and easy to read. Many of the designs display a good deal of illustrion or photorealism, two of my favorite current trends that can contribute a lot to a design.

Creating Sexy Stylesheets

Lately, I have taken interest in discussing methods of creating sexy stylesheets. While CSS can be used to create sexy websites, writing CSS can actually be an artform by itself. The way in which CSS is created, structured, and maintained can be a thing of beauty. So how does one create sexy stylesheets?

Real-World CSS Zen for Your Site

By now we all know the benefits of “web standards” - creating sites where content and presentation are separated by use of semantic XHTML and CSS. Early adopters of web standards have long extolled the many payoffs.

Stay on :target

In this article, I want to introduce you to a really powerful CSS3 pseudo selector called :target. Much like :hover, :target is invoked during certain interactions with the website. Specifically, when applied to a fragment identifier.

Streamline Your Forms with Widgets

“Advanced forms” are rarely that. A more fitting name would be “Overwhelming and confusing forms”. But with Jason Long’s clever approach to streamlining a screen full of checkboxes, you might just be able to once again look fondly on your forms.

Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?

The user of a table would be looking for one or more data points. Therefore, if we set a task that uses a table, and zebra striping does make things easier, then we would expect to see improvements in accuracy and speed.

Planning Your Stylesheet: The Definitive Guide

Don't let your stylesheet files get out of control - follow these guidelines right from the start and you'll easily be able to manage and update your CSS files.

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.

Pay Attention to the CSS @media Rule: When to Define the Screen Media Type

The CSS @media rule is a useful way to target an HTML or XML document to an intended output device. Use of the print media is now fairly widespread, and provides a much cleaner means of creating printer-friendly pages than does a separate 'printable version.' The use of the screen media has been somewhat underused, perhaps because of an overly general assumption that screen is merely the 'default rendering.' However, in regard to positioning--especially absolute positioning--the screen media type has an important meaning that is not covered by media-free stylesheet rules.

Year Zero

I am as frustrated as any other web developer at the glacial pace of the CSS Working Group and the lack of progress with CSS3. I just don't think we need to dump the baby out with the bathwater. Change is needed. It looks like change is coming. It may even be a regime change. But let's not start drawing up new calendar systems just yet. The clock of CSS is running slow. We need to wind it up. That doesn't mean we need to smash it.

Screen Readers and 'display:none'

When an element is hidden with display: none, the browser doesn't generate a box for the element; the element is not visible on the screen, and the layout of the page isn't effected by the element. As screen readers are supposed to read the screen, it makes sense that they do not announce content that is hidden with display: none.

CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing

CSS is ten years old this year. Such an anniversary is an opportunity to revisit the past and chart the future. CSS has fundamentally changed web design by separating style from structure. It has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make marked-up pages look rightand CSS3 proposes additional properties requested by designers.

Put Your Content in My Pocket

The iPhone includes a sophisticated new Safari browser. This version is touted as 'the most advanced web browser on a portable device' and from what I've seen, it deserves this accolade. So what does this mean for you? Millions of visitors accessing your content on a small display with very high resolution. At some point in the near future, you're going to want to take a look at your current site design to make sure that it looks good and works well on this new device and its Mobile Safari browser.