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."
But we all know that it can be fixed...
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.
from the slashdot-is-moving-to-css-in-just-a-few-weeks dept. ...
... the apocalypse might be at hand after all! Yippee!
Is that for real? Not been having much problems which Slashdot recently, but if they're chucking away their mess of tables
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.
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 (none of which implement CSS 100% correctly anyway).
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 (all proudly displaying their little W3c validation logos of course).
It's still perfectly possible to create valid, semantic XHTML/CSS markup that uses the odd table for layout (no, I don't mean a heap of nested ones with spacer gifs!).
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.
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!
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Structural markup is the essential differentiating factor, not just that you have found out how to replace tables with divs ...
</rant> over.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
I'm a programmer who has been thrust into the world of CSS and been on many occasions quite frustrated with it. It seems arbitrary, arcane, and particularly difficult to debug. On top of that, it seems to have a set of zealots who defend it (and demand it) with bitter viciousness.
I had concluded that CSS was "programmer-friendly" in the same way that a rusty jigsaw was "penis-friendly".
I recently picked up a book entitled _Designing with Web Standards_ by Jeffrey Zeldman. It's a good an honest resource, and he even claims to avoid zealotry. But, in the book, he examines a particular website, one with a plain-jane two-column appearance, which he said took "three CSS experts" to re-code from tables to CSS layout. Not three CSS advocates, three CSS *experts*. On top of that, their "solution" turned out to be a hack.
Honestly, what success am I supposed to expect in using CSS when recoding common layouts in CSS is a struggle for even CSS experts? I am forced to conclude that it is folly trying to adhere to any kind of CSS standards with any kind of rigor until CSS itself becomes more mature.
Now this is where I get flamed. I'm sorry, but I have to call it like I see it.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
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
there's some serious advantages - like the fact that all major and most minor browsers will render them identically, that they're far more intuitive, and that they allow re-flowing in a way that you can only do with CSS attributes that are explicitly designed to mimic the layout algorithms of "traditional" tables
If you really believe all of this, then I don't think theres hope for you... unless you define "major and minor" browsers as "IE". Tables get rendered differently by different browsers, just like CSS gets rendered differently.. the only thing is that it's easier to work around CSS bugs
CSS is *WAY* more intuitive than tables ever were (and there's a reason - because it's designed that way.) You use DIVs to define blocks of code, then use CSS to say how you want them positioned. With tables, you have to screw around with row and column spans *in the HTML itself*.
It's pretty obvious that you prefer tables because you've spent a lot of time learning their quirks - don't slam CSS just because you don't know how to use it properly.
try using the correct tools for the right job
If you really believed this, you'd be using CSS.