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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."

14 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. Re:But they forgot.. by RangerRick98 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Interesting; the article I read has that site listed third as "Official Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Specification."

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    "You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
  2. CSS Cheat Sheet by Sheriff+Fatman · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    -- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.
  3. can I add one? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The edit css plugin for firefox lets you edit the css data for any page and instantly see the changes.

  4. CSS Sidebar for Mozilla/Firefox by superflippy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
  5. Best - NCDesign.org by N8F8 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Awesome reference for HTML and CSS that shows examples and browser compatability:
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    "God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
  6. The problem is browsers, not CSS by goldspider · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  7. Re:The REAL news ... by dancallaghan · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeah about time too ... I mean, CSS has only been around for almost nine years ...

  8. quirksmode by eelcoh · · Score: 3, Informative

    Has anyone mentioned http://www.quirksmode.org/?

  9. Re:The REAL news ... by SnowWolf2003 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Looks like it is for real

    See CmdrTaco's journal

  10. Re:No CSS on that site. by Bogtha · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's still easier to do certain things with table-based layouts than it is with CSS alone. Control of vertical positioning/height being the obvious one. That and fluid layouts.

    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're a busy designer, sometimes you just have to take the pragmatic route rather that waste hours or days trying to make a pure CSS layout work across all the common browsers

    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.

    Either that or (worse) you compromise the design to make it fit the limitations of a pure CSS layout.

    I think the latter approach accounts for the huge number of 'identikit', bloggish-looking sites out there

    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.

    It's still perfectly possible to create valid, semantic XHTML/CSS markup that uses the odd table for layout

    Er, no. Not semantic. Not at all. If you are using tables for anything other than tabular data, it's not semantic.

    While I'm all for standards and separating content from presentation, at this stage of the game, we just need to choose the solution that works best.

    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 know it's probably heresy to say this, but IMO tables work in an intuitive way that you can easily visualize whereas a mass of floated DIVs often do not!

    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.

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    Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
  11. Re:CSS tables by Richard+W.M.+Jones · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  12. Re:-moz-stylings by arkanes · · Score: 3, Informative
    These are the mozilla-specific names for features that are in CSS 3. The dash prefix, by the way, is the correct and standards-compliant way to create extensions.

    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.

  13. Re:CSS tables by Millennium · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.