CSSnewbie

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

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Resources>Web Design>CSS>Blogs

jQuery-Based Popout Ad: Part 1

Today I’d like to start an article series of three parts, the result of which will be a popout-style, jQuery-based box like the one pictured above, which I think strikes a nice balance on the obtrusion-scale.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Interaction Design>Ajax

jQuery-Based Popout Ad: Part 2

We're going to take the ad we built last week and animate it, as well as provide the user with a means to open and close the ad. We’ll be using jQuery for most of what we do, so you’ll need to include the jQuery library script at the top of your document for this to work (see the source of the example page to see how this is done).

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Interaction Design>Ajax

Generating Automatic Website Footnotes with jQuery

Generating footnotes for HTML documents in the past was always a slow, painful task — and every time I did it, I wondered why there wasn’t a better, easier way. Today, I’m happy to announce that I’ve come up with a better solution to web footnotes using the jQuery JavaScript framework and a few tags and attributes that already exist in XHTML.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Interaction Design>Ajax

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS>RSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Document Design>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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

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.

Coyier, Chris. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

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?

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS>Printing

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Document Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

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?

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Typography>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>CSS

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.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>CSS