#27716
CSS should not be used to present homemade XML as web pages. You end up with nothing but style. Neither man nor machine can understand the structure of your document. CSS should only be used for widely supported XML applications like XHTML.
Tverskov, Jesper. Smack the Mouse (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS>XML
#25501
Drop-Down Menus, Horizontal Style
Anyone who has created drop-down menus will be familiar with the large quantities of scripting such menus typically require. But, using structured HTML and simple CSS, it is possible to create visually appealing drop-downs that are easy to edit and update, and that work across a multitude of browsers, including Internet Explorer. Better still, for code-wary designers, no JavaScript is required!
Rigby, Nick. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>DHTML>CSS
#23322
Let your server do the walking! Whether you're replacing one headline or a thousand, Stewart Rosenberger's Dynamic Text Replacement automatically swaps XHTML text with an image of that text, consistently displayed in any font you own. The markup is clean, semantic, and accessible. No CSS hacks are required, and you needn't open Photoshop or any other image editor. Read about it today; use it on personal and commercial web projects tomorrow.
Rosenberger, Stewart. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS>XHTML
#25356
The Early Bird Catches the CSS: Planning Structural HTML
Do you struggle to make the switch to Cascading Style Sheets? Are you using some CSS but can't quite complete the transition to all CSS? Your problem may be that you are not thinking about Cascading Style Sheets early enough in the process of making a web page.
DeBolt, Virginia. Wise-Women (2005). Design>Web Design>CSS
#20208
Cascading style sheets (CSS) are an elegantly designed extension to the Web and one of the greatest hopes for recapturing the Web's ideal of separation of presentation and content. The Web is the ultimate cross-platform system, and your content will be presented on such a huge variety of devices that pages should specify the meaning of the information and leave presentation details to a merger (or 'cascade') of site-specified style sheets and the user's preferences. If the introduction of WebTV broke your pages, you will appreciate the ability to introduce new page designs by creating a single style sheet file rather than by modifying thousands of content pages.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2001). Design>Web Design>CSS
#22363
Review: Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design 
When I first looked at this book, I was very much impressed with its layout. There are lots of beautiful and clear examples, along with well laid-out pages. Chapters consist of various CSS projects, such as creating an events calendar. You can download companion files for each chapter in zipped form from a Web site the author has set up. So the book is in fact an instructional one, one that you can use to learn as you go or just read straight through, depending on your preference.
Hawley, Todd. Technical Communication Online (2003). Articles>Reviews>Web Design>CSS
#25544
With old-school table layout methods, vertical positioning is a piece of cake. With CSS layout, it's a piece of something else. New ALA contributing writer Bobby van der Sluis shows how to regain control of footers and other vertically positioned layout elements via CSS, JavaScript, and the DOM.
van der Sluis, Bobby. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS>JavaScript
#21326
It's a beginning CSS designer's nightmare and a frequently asked question at ALA: Multi-column CSS layouts can run into trouble when one of the columns stops short of its intended length. Here's a simple solution.
Cederholm, Dan. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS
#10563
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) save bandwidth, vastly reducing the size of your files when compared to old-style markup. With Styles, your sites load faster. You work faster, too. Styles shave grueling hours of grunt-work off your design workload: one brief CSS document can style an entire domain; and when it's time to redesign, you can execute site-wide changes in minutes instead of days. Style Sheets bring genuine leading and sophisticated margination to the web, easing our readers' eyestrain while bringing us the control of negative space we take for granted in other media. They offer exciting new possibilities, from absolute positioning, to interactive manipulation of text and images. And they allow us to create sophisticated layouts while doing no harm to the underlying structure of our documents – ensuring that search engines (as well as hand-held devices, web phones, and other futuristic browser morphs) can 'understand' our pages as easily as readers do.
Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2000). Design>Web Design>CSS
#14896
Flexible Layouts with CSS Positioning
This article was prompted by the growing crop of CSS “tips and tricks” articles that have surfaced in the last year or two. Typical of these are the three column design making use of left and right fixed columns hanging on their margins; and the use of @import, instead of JavaScript, to feed appropriate style sheets to differently enabled browsers. These ideas are very cool and their authors should rightly be heaped with praise, but I can’t help feeling we’ve been here before. Remember when you figured out how to make a table of images display without the gap? Or how about when you worked out the browser’s table rendering algorithm and started using “educator” rows to guarantee correct display? Even more sinful, do you remember discovering those “hidden” (non-standard) attributes like marginwidth? As web designers, we are naturally drawn to tricks, gimmicks, and workarounds. We need to keep our attention on what we are trying to achieve in long run.
Falby, Doug. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Web Design>CSS
#27301
The ability to customize fonts— in Mac OS, in word processing documents, in Web pages— is really nothing new. However, when it comes to changing fonts on Web pages, the mechanism is decidedly less intuitive and certainly less than easy. Having to litter a Web page with FONT FACE tags makes for larger files, and larger headaches as you weed through these tags to find that one misspelled word. CSS makes the process of selecting a font easy, and even better, it provides a fallback mechanism for those times when users don'’t have the fonts you wanted to appear.
Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>Typography>CSS
#25518
From Table Hacks to CSS Layout: A Web Designer's Journey
Redesigning A List Apart using CSS should have been easy. It wasn't. The first problem was understanding how CSS actually works. The second was getting it to work in standards-compliant browsers. A journey of discovery.
Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Web Design>CSS
#20210
Get Started With Cascading Style Sheets
HTML can be frustrating when you want to control the appearance of your Web page and its contents. Tables are awkward, frames are annoying, and FONT tags threaten to overwhelm your code. But for the first three generations of browsers, HTML was all you had to work with. Not anymore.
Rotter, Matt and Charity Kahn. Builder.com (1997). Design>Web Design>CSS
#24078
High Accessibility, High Design: CSS to the Rescue
Anyone with good graphic-design skills can use Web standards to produce attractive Web sites that function adequately for nearly all viewers and very well for most viewers – including people with disabilities. This article will explore a few details concerning the interplay of accessibility and Web design.
Voren, Naar. NaarVoren.nl (2004). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>CSS
#26286
High-Resolution Image Printing
You probably already know how to use media-specific CSS to provide a suitable layout for the printed page. But how great would it be to be able to go further and provide a better print alternative through the use of specific high-resolution images specifically for print? Awesome? Here’s how.
Howard, Ross. List Apart, A (2005). Design>Web Design>CSS>Printing
#27303
This article covers horizontal sizing and shows how to determine the width of elements with CSS. Once you’ve mastered both height and width, you should be well on your way to effectively using CSS.
Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>CSS
#28444
How HTML, CSS and JavaScript Work Together in Web Pages 
The three main technologies used to create modern web pages (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) each do different jobs. HTML should be used only for structuring content. Cascading Style Sheets should be used for applying all visual styles. JavaScript should be used for (almost) all interactive functionality, and should always be referenced in separate files, never written into HTML.
Hunt, Ben. Web Design From Scratch (2006). Design>Web Design>CSS>DHTML
#28712
Many web designers, myself included, come to the web with a background in the graphic arts. We think in pictures, not in code. When we first begin designing for the web, we'll use HTML and CSS crudely, as a means to an end--a method of arranging pretty boxes in space--without grasping the true nature of the box itself or what it contains. Altering that strictly visual mentality is the highest hurdle to overcome when a graphic designer first dives into semantics and web standards. For the visual designer, really understanding web standards means you'll have to change the way you think about design.
Cook, Craig. List Apart, A (2007). Design>Web Design>Standards>CSS
#25451
Hybrid CSS dropdowns allow access to all pages, keep the user aware of where she is within the site, and are clean and light to boot.
Shepherd, Eric. List Apart, A (2005). Design>Web Design>DHTML>CSS
#26758
Many articles have been written on the grail, and several good templates exist. However, all the existing solutions involve sacrifices: proper source order, full-width footers, and lean markup are the usual compromises made in pursuit of this elusive layout.
Levine, Matthew. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>CSS
#28452
Inheritance and Cascading in CSS
This is a guide to help people learning CSS to understand how a browser works out what styles to apply to a particular element. As we saw in the introduction to CSS, there are lots of ways you can apply styles to a particular element. When more than one of these methods applies, how do you know which styles will be applied? Fortunately, these rules are quite simple, once you know them. This article tries to explain all. Of course, the best way really to learn this stuff is to try stuff out and see what happens.
Hunt, Ben. Web Design From Scratch (2006). Design>Web Design>Standards>CSS
#26765
Internet Explorer and CSS Issues
Internet Explorer has a number of CSS issues. Find out what these issues are and how to get around them, so your website looks the same in all browsers.
Moss, Trenton. Webcredible (2006). Design>Web Design>CSS
#26324
Introducing the CSS3 Multi-Column Module
This module’s intent is to allow content to flow into multiple columns inside an element. It offers new CSS properties that let the designers specify in how many columns an element should be rendered. The browser takes care of formatting the text so that the columns are balanced.
Savarese, Cédric. List Apart, A (2005). Design>Web Design>CSS
#28451
Introduction to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a smart way to add styling information to web pages. While it's possible to add styling to HTML (e.g. using the tag) HTML should only be used to structure your content, CSS is the only way you should apply styling.
Hunt, Ben. Web Design From Scratch (2006). Design>Web Design>Standards>CSS
#24834
Invasion of the Body Switchers
How style-sheet switching could be extended to give users even more choices or accessibility enhancements.
Clarke, Andy and James Edwards. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS
