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

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.

Sheriar, Mani. Vitamin (2007). Design>Web Design>CSS>Standards

Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards

A look at the markup behind Slashdot.org that demonstrates how simple -- and cost-effective -- the switch to a standards-compliant Slashdot could be.

Frommelt, Daniel M. List Apart, A (2003). Design>Web Design>Standards>CSS

Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards Part II

In Part I, we showed how Slashdot could save money and reduce bandwidth requirements by converting to semantic XHTML markup and CSS layout. In Part II, we explore how standards-compliant markup and deft use of CSS could make Slashdot (and your sites) play nicely in print and on handheld devices.

Frommelt, Daniel M. List Apart, A (2003). Design>Web Design>Standards>CSS

Twelve Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards

if you're starting to work with CSS, everything you've learned to this point probably feels useless, or worse than useless.

Henick, Ben. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>CSS>Standards

Wither the Star-HTML Hack?

Recently the Microsoft blog told us that some of our CSS hacks will stop working in IE7, a fact we detailed in our first IE7 article. While this is generally good news, it is a bit disturbing that the Holly hack in particular will cease to function while many of the layout problems it is meant to fix will still be there, and will still need fixing.

Bergevin, Holly and John Gallant. Position is Everything. Design>Web Design>Standards>CSS

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.

Keith, Jeremy. Adactio (2007). Design>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

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.

Bowman, Douglas. Stop Design (2004). Presentations>Web Design>Standards>CSS

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.

Bowman, Douglas. Stop Design (2004). Presentations>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

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSS Newbie (2009). Design>Web Design>Standards>CSS

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.

Coding Fool, A (2007). Resources>Web Design>Standards>CSS