Slashdot Mirror
10 Best Resources for CSS
victorialever writes "Since one could have noticed an increasing number of websites that are employing CSS and an increasing number of resources talking about how great CSS is, it seems to become impossible not to jump on the CSS bandwagon as well. The 10 Best Resources for CSS provides an impressive list of the CSS resources which have recently become essential for web-developers. Among them - CSSZenGarden, The Web Developer's Handbook, Stylegala, PositionIsEverything etc."
Google Cache of article
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
http://www.csszengarden.com/ http://www.alvit.de/handbook/ http://www.wpdfd.com/editorial/basics/index.html http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/ http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/ http://www.cssvault.com/ http://glish.com/css/home.asp http://webhost.bridgew.edu/etribou/layouts/index.h tml
http://www.positioniseverything.net/
http://www.stylegala.com/
Interesting; the article I read has that site listed third as "Official Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Specification."
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
May I also recommend Dave Child's CSS Cheat Sheet ?
Print it out & stick it on the wall/partition - it covers almost all the CSS you'll use day-to-day, and (IMHO) it's much quicker than digging through the online documentation or the O'Reilly book.
Similar things for Javascript, PHP, etc. are linked from here if you're interested.
-- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.
The edit css plugin for firefox lets you edit the css data for any page and instantly see the changes.
I find the CSS Sidebar immensely useful. It lets me quickly look up a style and see what values it takes. It's also a good reminder of some of the little-used styles.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
slashcache
also here's a few interesting links bookmarks layouts more layouts
I also wish they would have listed the web developer's handbook , at least as an aside. It's a good starting point. I keep it bookmarked and use it to get to other sites.
I have something to say. It's better to burn out than to FADE AWAY!
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I notice slashcode seems to have done away with table layout, on the main page anyway.
Umm, it isn't valid semantic markup if you are using tables for layout.
I agree that CSS got limitation, but not with vertical height/positioning and fluid layouts. The only thing bothering me is vertical centering.
During the US Civil War, the sunken USS Merrimack was raised and converted to an ironclad by the Confederates, who renamed it the CSS Virginia (which later fought in the famous battle of the ironclads). So the parent was just trying to make a, albeit lame, joke about the acronym "CSS." It wasn't truly offtopic, and it definitely wasn't a troll.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
With multiple stylesheets no less! Time to pre-order Duke Nukum Forever!
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="//www.slashcode.com/base.css" ><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="//www.slashcode.com/ostgnavbar.css" >
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="//www.slashcode.com/slashcode.css" title="Slashcode" >
<link rel="Alternate stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="//www.slashcode.com/slashdot.css" title="Slashdot" >
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="//www.slashcode.com/print.css" >
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I'm reading that book too, but I have a different take on why it took three CSS "experts" to re-code that page.
It's not CSS' fault; it's the noncompliant browsers. Zeldman's book is basically about using CSS to build a standards-compliant web site that renders properly on a variety of non-compliant browsers.
Given the differing level of support among the browsers out there, it's no wonder that one has to jump through some hoops to get a consistent display.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
1. You don't have to modify every .html file when it comes time to re-design.
2. Accessibility - your site will be readable by screen-readers and PDAs.
3. You can use standalone CSS to control the overall dosplay, and in-line CSS to control page-specific elements.
I wouldn't call myself a CSS "expert", but I am a recent convert.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Yeah about time too ... I mean, CSS has only been around for almost nine years ...
Google's Directory on Web Design -> FAQs, Help, and Tutorials :P)
Eric Meyer's CSS Reference page (warning: requires frames, but it's tasteful use
More on Eric Meyer, who is web-design guru in general, but well-known for his css/edge presentation, and, well, check out his site, definitely worth a read.
Well, that's it, other's that I know of have already been posted.
Ironically, the main version of The Web Developer's Handbook wasn't mentioned in the list. However, I actually feel great being slashdotted again. ;)
vitaly.friedman -> creative.web.design.saarbruecken.germany
Has anyone mentioned http://www.quirksmode.org/?
Looks like it is for real
See CmdrTaco's journal
Okay, vertical positioning, I'll give you. But fluid layouts? That's not hard at all. Websites are fluid by default, they only stop being fluid when you set explicit widths using fixed units. You can do that with CSS or tables.
If you are an experienced designer, then you've already done similar layouts a hundred times before, so you have the code and bug workarounds memorised and making it "work across all the common browsers" is at the very least least as easy as dumping a load of table code into each page.
Er, CSS is far less limited than tables (check out the CSS Zen Garden), and I've seen way, way, way more websites out there using tables that all look alike.
The reason most weblogs look alike is because they come with a set of default templates that people don't tweak very much.
Er, no. Not semantic. Not at all. If you are using tables for anything other than tabular data, it's not semantic.
At any stage of the game you need to choose the solution that works best. In my experience, switching to CSS saved me a whole lot of time that was spent dealing with cruddy code. Sure, in the beginning, that extra time was wasted on stuff I didn't know about CSS, but once I got a bit of experience, it was a real time-saver.
I've heard that before. Exclusively from developers that have years of experience with tables and who haven't spent any significant amount of time with CSS. Once they spend a week or two coding CSS every day, they wonder how they did without it. And if they never had much experience with tables in the first place, they don't want to bother with all the crap associated with tables (counting rowspans is never intuitive).
Really, just think about the difference involved in "just move that over to the right a bit" for the two approaches. With tables you have to insert an extra column, count rowspans, if there's any rows spanning across the whole layout you have to break for that, alter its colspan and put another cell below it with rowspans... and with CSS, you open up the stylesheet and change one number.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Just don't use CSS for the things it's not very good for, like replacing a variable width, variable height table layout.
this is a great reference, and it shows which features are IE only vs which are standard.
Amazing magic tricks
Why? I really don't understand this, what's wrong with divs?
So that your site works in older browsers. - If it's just a bunch of nested divs, it'll collapse into short lines of text on an older browser.So that your site works in text-only browsers. Not just some Unix reprobates using Lynx, but people using mobile or otherwise "reduced" devices.
So that a speech reader (an accessibility device used by the millions of partially sighted and blind people in the world) can stress the structure of the page when reading it, which helps the visitor to understand how it is laid out even when they can't see it.
So that you can easily retarget content just by changing the stylesheet or (better) providing device-specific alternate stylesheets.
So that search engine spiders can understand the structure of your page - eg. they can identify the important headings.
So that you don't forget what elements in your site mean.
That's just off the top of my head.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
the way to do it is to break your layout into it's basic components (often header, couple of columns and a footer) and make them divs. for everything else inside those divs, use descendant selectors.
nesting endless divs will mess your head up. using fewer divs but more descendant selectors is the path to enlightenment.
FWIW, ZenGarden is an interesting place to look at and is made by some very talented designers, but some of the designs are rather restricting. "The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation" but it isn't the final word in design.
Disable CSS in your web browser. You'll get "just the facts" from the websites that use HTML + CSS, and you'll get "the facts dressed up with lots of style" from the websites that use HTML + tables. It sounds to me like HTML + CSS does what you want, not HTML + tables.
That's exactly what CSS was designed to do. Want a plainer website? Use a user-stylesheet that disables all the backgrounds, hides all the graphics, and uses your colour scheme. That's the "Cascade" in "Cascading Style Sheets".
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I believe that -moz-border-radius is already mapped to it's CSS3 name, but if not they will be as CSS3 support is implemented.
Oh, don't be so silly. A two column layout? Please.
body{background:url(tilingstripe.png) center repeat-y;}
#leftcol{width:49%;float:left} #rightcol{width:49%;float:left}
Pshaw. And I'm a *girl*.
-Dody
Why? I really don't understand this, what's wrong with divs?
Nothing is inherently wrong with divs, as long as you keep in mind that divs don't mean anything, and that a meaningful tag is always preferable when one is available.
To illustrate this, let's look at some common page-design tasks. Suppose that you want your page's title (which you'll type in text) and an image to appear at the top of your page. Many people would tell you to use a div with an id of 'head' to wrap everything, but there's a better way: simply use an h1 tag and give it a background and background-image. By using a meaningful tag for your page header, you've cut out excess HTML code, and the result is more elegant.
Let's say, however, that you want more than just text and an image in your header. Suppose, for example,that you want to do something like Slashdot, using text, an image, and more images representing the last several categories that have been updated. There is no one tag that can encompass all of this, and so here we have a case where a div is appropriate. Give it a meaningful ID -'header' is a common choice- and put your header elements inside it.
The rule for elegant code is to use the most meaningful tags which will do what you want. DIV tags are suitable when nothing else is available, and there are times when that happens. However, they should not be used when better tags exist.
That same design would have been trivial to convert to CSS (dropping most of the extraneous markup along the way) if those experts were able to use the full power of CSS2. Unfortunately a significant number of people use a browser that has yet to make any headway into supporting CSS2. You may be able to guess who produces said browser.
Why is anything anything?
If you look at the following web site with property for sale in Nice, you will see it uses extensive CSS. The original web site was done using tables, which I then converted to CSS. There isn't a single image in the whole of the HTML of the web site apart from a few photos which are content and not design.
Advantages CSS over tables:
* the nested tables were fixed width, too complicated to convert to proportional, and if you resized the windows to anything larger than 1024x768 then you had to pan around using the scroll bars. The CSS degrades wonderfully. Even if the display breaks and doesn't look as pretty, it's still usable at any window size
* pages are a fraction of their original size, and the actual content is clearly visible and editable
Advantages tables over CSS:
* cross-browser compatibility. Everything always works in Firefox but IE is a nightmare. Grey bars appearing randomly for no apparent reason, margins having unpredictable behaviour, and things breaking for no reason when pixels are exactly aligned (as proved by basic arithmetic)
From painful experience I can recommend that you get the designer to mock up in photoshop, and then you design the site directly in CSS and ask for the images to be chopped into the way you need as you go along. Don't get the designer to provide you the HTML in table form which you then convert afterwards.
Hope this helps,
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
This is a great extension which enables you to see and edit (in real time) CSS for sites, as well as overlay ID and class info on the actual page! BRILLIANT! (and a lot more stuff too) WEB DEVELOPER
To be fair, Zeldman's book was written an age ago by CSS standards, and I think you'll find most standards-savvy web designers would most likely consider the book as more a "call-to-arms" than an actual instructional manual.
The hacks described in the book WERE cutting-edge at the time, when browser support was (far) less than perfect (even less so than today). Hence the need for experts.
These experts pioneered a great deal of the CSS knowledge we have today, and it's by their early efforts that we have such a wealth of cross-browser techniques available. These techniques are quite mature in themselves, and allow designers the freedom create complex CSS-based designs.
So - no flame, just a little perspective.