[X]HTML and CSS
Now that even Slashdot has made the move to CSS it's safe to say that the CSS advocacy battle is slowly being won. It's time to talk about the elephant in the corner of the room: stylesheet maintainab...
New in Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 3: bug 238099 - implement at-rule for matching on site/document URL. Here's the example:
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.mozilla.org/) {
#q { background: white ! im...
I've been thinking a lot about per-site user stylsheets recently. Eric Meyer's CSS signatures are great for sites that support them (as this site does), but the sites that really need altering are hig...
The minutes from the Atom/W3C discussion in New York have been posted online. Unfortunately the default formatting is pretty difficult to follow. I found it a lot easier to figure out who was saying w...
The css-discuss wiki has pretty much looked after itself since its inception a year and a half ago, thanks to a small but active community of wiki gardeners. Unfortunately, recent months have seen a r...
I decided to hold off commenting on the news that Lockergnome were dropping their CSS layout in favour of a table based alternative until I had seen the new design for myself. I figured that they were...
Stu Nicholls dropped me a line earlier to pimp his new CSS demo site, www.s7u.co.uk. He's got some really nice tricks and the site warrants serious exploration. There's a good take on the classic 3 co...
New from Russ Weakley: Selectutorial, which taks his widely acclaimed step by step CSS tutorial style and applies it to CSS selectors. Having a full understanding of selectors is critical if you're go...
Out with the orange, in with the green. As with my last redesign, only the CSS changed. A fun deviation with this one was that it was a collaboration between myself and Natalie over nearly 5,000 miles...
Via Web-Graphics, Petr Pisar's Underscore Hack provides a new way of targetting CSS rules specifically at Internet Explorer on Windows. As with all such hacks, the pros and cons of using this approach...
This email to the css-discuss mailing list does a great job of describing the confusion and frustration that still confronts traditional web developers who are only just starting out on the road to ma...
Via Craig, Big John and Holly Bergevin present Float: The Theory and Flowing and Positioning: Two Page Models. Both articles take a complex topic and present it in clear, straight forward terms with e...
For as long as I've understood the issue, I've been an advocate of liquid layouts over fixed widths for web page design. Liquid layouts are layouts like the one used by this site, where the page adjus...
Evan Williams on Google's intranet weblogs:
How many people blog at Google?
Not sure what the count is, but I know there's a couple hundred or more. It's really interesting to see the network ...
This morning, I finally decided to install libxml2 and see what all the fuss was about, in particular with respect to XPath. What followed is best described as an enlightening experience.
XPath is ...
Chris Hester's 3D Border Demo 2 (via Web Graphics) is an impressive demo of just how much you can achieve with CSS borders. His Tips & Demos collection is worth browsing through as well; I particu...
Russ Weakley's latest offering, Floatutorial, is probably the single most valuable CSS tutorial I've seen to date. Floats are one of the most powerful constructs offered by CSS, but they are also the ...
Tantek has created/discovered a new CSS hack, the Mid Pass Filter. This filter allows you to write CSS rules that will only be applied by IE 5 and IE 5.5 for Windows. This is great news, as those are ...
I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but Paul Hammond's open letter to "tableless" recoders caused quite a stir a few weeks back with its extensive list of reasons that recoding someone else's sit...
Mimicking Magazines (via techno weenie) is a nice set of CSS styled paragraphs inspired by the design of Cosmopolitan. They resize well thanks to intelligent use of ems for sizing instead of pixels....
Just spotted in a comment by Drew McLellan on Russell Beattie's Notebook:
I'm comfortable using tables for forms. My point of view is that they are interactive tabular data.
I'd never thought of...
Russ Weakley has followed up his excellent Listamatic with a useful set of tutorials on styling lists. The style of the tutorial looks worth emulating: each page adds a new property, explaining what i...
I've talked about image rollovers on this site before, but I've never seen a technique I like half as much as Pixy's Fast rollovers, no preload needed. Like all good techniques, it's so simple I'm sur...
Russ Weakley's Listamatic borrows a whole bunch of fun CSS list effects from around the web and shows how they can be applied to the same markup to produce a large range of different results....
Congratulations to Eric Meyer on the launch of his new consultancy business, Complex Spiral Consulting (named after his famous css/edge demo). The new company's tag line is "Helping clients improve th...
Jesse Ruderman's Blogidate bookmarklets cycle through all of the textareas on the current page and submit their contents for validation. I suggested an alternative approach, and to my great delight ha...
In a recent issue of the Sitepoint Tech Times newsletter, Kevin Yank explains (in detail, with pictures) the recurring problem in CSS of trying to create a three column layout with columns of equal he...
Over on Kryogenix, Stuart has solved the CSS image replacement problem with some clever application of the overflow: hidden; property. The Fahrner Image Replacement technique is often used to replace ...
Don Park questions the benefits of emitting XHTML. In one sense, Don is right; publishing a whole site using XHTML in this day and age brings very little benefit and can cause a great deal of grief. B...
I'm not sure how I missed this one. Holly Bergevin's Perched Upon a Lily Pad is a CSS demo that shows off a 3 column layout with a flexible header, full length columns, horizontal navigation bar and c...
Tom Gilder has started a series of posts looking ahead to CSS3. In his first installment, he describes the awesomely powerful ::outside pseudo-element. Using this, CSS3 authors can apply multiple back...
Lachlan Cannon shows off some neat tricks for styling forms with minimal markup on the freshly redesigned illuminosity. I used his CSS for the forms in the comment authentication prototype and it w...
One of the niggles I have with CSS 2 is that I frequently have to define colours multiple times. Consider this blog: I use orange in several places (as a background to the header, a border around the ...
Doug Bowman and Adaptive Path have launched the redesign of the Adaptive Path site. It's well worth exploring: the site looks gorgeous, and is a great example of best practise structural markup, CSS a...
Yet another groovy CSS demo: Drop shadow effects using only two nested divs and an alpha-transparent PNG. They look passable in IE as well. Another gem from Paul Hammond's link blog. Incidentally, Pau...
Mike Golding offers a solution to the slightly odd IE bug whereby divs in CSS layout sites suffer glitches as the page is scrolled (from December 2002):
The problem is in the way that Internet Ex...
I've never really played with the CSS overflow property, partly because I don't trust it to work in a decent number of browsers. Haiko Hebig's Title Pictures show off a clever use for the property to ...
Jay Small: Reintroduce yourself to HTML. A call to web authors everywhere to go back to their roots and realise that HTML is not something that should be avoided. He makes some great points, such as t...
Information on Border Slants (via Paul Hammond). Border slants are the effect whereby diagonal lines can be created using pure CSS, by taking advantage of the fact that thick borders around a box meet...
SitePoint are running a CSS Design Contest, inspired by the Zen Garden.
CSS/Exp is Mark Schenk's collection of CSS experiments which show off some pretty advanced CSS, much of which oonly works i...
Just to show it can be done, here's the new RNIB site design (as mentioned earlier) re-done with a CSS layout. It's something of a first draft - I've only tested it in IE6 and Firebird on Windows and ...
Ben Meadowcroft has a new tutorial up showing how definition lists can be used in semantic markup for lists of definitions, such as glossaries.
Definition Lists are the third type of list present i...
My good friend Andy is soliciting applications to be his other half via his blog. He's a lovely guy, so go sign up! More importantly, the stylesheet for his romance test includes this gem:
label {
...
Dave Shea: The Way Forward:
HTML will die. Today's internet is obsolete, and anyone still coding in HTML 4 is planning the obsolescence of their own code. The big picture says that if, and this i...
Eric Meyer has released a new selection of designs over on Meyerweb. The designs are inspiring, and Eric's CSS is well worth perusing for style tips and insights in to reliable methods of creating rel...
Tom Gilder: "I did this in HTML, how do I do it in CSS?". A collection of tips for replicating visual formatting effects in old-style HTML with their CSS equivalents. A good resource for people just g...
No one appeared to notice, but the CSS2 Recommendation had its five year birthday on Monday the 12th of May. Maybe now people will stop writing it off as a new and unproven technology and start lookin...
This is something we've needed for a long time. The CSS Zen Garden demonstrates CSS as used by graphic designers, and is a truly beautiful sight to behold. It currently showcases 5 radically different...
I still plan to go ahead with a CSS tutorial series, as promised. I'm delaying the start, partly to give myself time to work out a good structure for the series, but mainly because I have a shed load ...
In The XHTML 100, Evan Goer describes an experiment in which he checked 119 site claiming to be with an XHTML doctype for full compliance with the W3C standards. His test consisted of three parts - a ...
Better structural markup rants than mine: Owen Briggs' classic Design Rant and Craig Saila's Tables or CSS? Choosing a Layout. Incidentally, my rant has sparked some excellent feedback in the comments...
I've been somewhat taken by surprise by the latest round of anti-CSS rants (initiated by JWZ, followups all over the place), mainly because I've been using CSS for long enough now that I'd started to ...
Via Craig Saila, Christopher Schmitt's 50 CSS Headings. Free CSS code snippets is definitely an idea who's time has come - there are hundreds of copy-and-paste javascript sites out there but hardly an...
Via Craig Saila, a method for getting IE to apply position: fixed without resorting to Javascript. It uses a conditional comment (slightly ugly but perfectly valid HTML) and works a treat. Kudos to Er...
By jove I think they've cracked it: Show applicable styles from Stuart and List computed (cascaded) styles from Pixy. Talk about being spoiled for choice :)...
My rambling post on CSS yesterday has had some excellent feedback, including some insightful comments on the weaknesses of CSS layouts. My call for a new bookmarklet drew responses (and implementation...
Dave Winer, in a follow up to his recent CSS problems:
I used to work reasonably well with designers until CSS came along. Now my writing is supposed to be a soldier in the fight for Web "standar...
A tool for generating 3 column CSS layouts that appears to use Big John's Source Ordered Columns technique. CSS generating tools are a thoroughly excellent idea and I'm surprised no one has done one b...
In all the fuss about Yahoo's new search interface over the past few days, the extensive use of CSS in the results pages was almost completely overlooked, probably because the page still contains a sm...
Time to update bookmarks: The Web Review CSS Support Charts, which went offline several weeks ago, are back at a new home on Netscape DevEdge. Despite not having been signiicantly updated since 2001 t...
CodeBitch's tips on isolating "crashing" bugs in CSS are mostly common sense, but are well worth reading in any case. Her methods could easily be adapted to help track down less serious bugs as well....
And the prize for freakiest CSS bug in the universe goes to... IE6! I was having a problem with the new design and a horizontal scrollbar occuring in IE6 for no readily apparent reason (the same bug h...
Redesigned. CSS changes only, took less than half an hour thanks to the zap style sheets, test styles and ancestors bookmarklets. I'm feeling orange :)
I've tested it in Phoenix, IE6 and Opera 7 on...
Via the XHTML-L mailing list, Simon St.Laurent's XHTML tips archive. An abundance of useful XHTML related information....
The alternative W3C buttons on AntiPixel are great. Jamie Zawinsky suggested recreating them in CSS. Stuart Langridge, Marek Prokop, Nick Boalch and Eric Meyer all had a go. Eric even did the Raging ...
I've put together some notes on constructing CSS layouts using absolute positioning over on the css-discuss Wiki. If you have any suggestions or improvements, just make them :)...
ThreeColumnLayouts in the css-discuss Wiki currently lists 24 freely available three column CSS layout templates....
After several months spent offline, the css-discuss archives are back and better than ever thanks to the hard work of my colleagues at Incutio. As well as updating the archives with all of the missing...
Gotta dig Sam's retro redesign, nested tables galore ;)...
Via Craig, Big John's new CSS layout "I can't believe it's not a table!". I've played with the key concept of this before: using a background-left image on the body and a background-right on an all-en...
SitePoint are running an excellent new tutorial series: XHTML Web Design for Beginners. There's little there for non-beginnners, but I'll certainly be sending new learners in that direction....
Daniel Glazman's proposal for smarter positioning in CSS (see also this blog entry) makes a lot of sense....
Paul Hammond is seeking the perfect way of marking up code snippets. He examines several methods, including this interesting specimen:
<ol class="codeListing"> <li><code>…<...
Douglas Bowman writes about Guiltless Image Use, describing a technique that uses CSS to cause text to vanish from the page, then replaces it with a background-image. I experimented with this techniqu...
Dan Loda: Doing forms justice. A demonstration of how labels, accesskeys, fieldsets and CSS can make a form that's usable, accessible and looks great. He even uses an optgroup in a select box, an ele...
Al Sparber makes perfect sense in article from June last year:
There's nothing inherently wrong with using tables to layout a web page. They are great for rapidly deployment sites for clients who...
Peter Van Djick asks why does hardly anyone use LABEL tags? It's a very good question - in my opinion label tags, like title attributes on links, are a complete no-brainer. They're well supported by a...
I'm really liking Jeffrey Zeldman's latest redesign. Aside from a pretty face, the markup holds some interesting ideas as well. For example, I've never seen a definition list used for a blogroll style...
I've knocked up another attempt at Weblogs.com in CSS, this time using floats instead of absolute/relative positioning. It seems to work pretty well....
Also, I know it isn't what Dave was after but I've recreated the front page of Weblogs.com in structural/semantic XHTML and CSS as well. Again, it works fine in Phoenix and IE 6 but probably needs a f...
Dave Winer:
A question for CSS design gurus. What's the best you can do with a table that has three columns like the one on Weblogs.Com. Let's see an example. I'd like the page to look good and l...
Scott Andrew points out another smart trick with body tag ID attributes - selectively showing and hiding navigation elements depending on the current page. This is a really neat idea, but it does lead...
Craig Saila points to the SearchEngineWatch Webpage Size Checker. It's a nice tool, but it doesn't appear to take the size of linked style sheets in to account. I was playing around with the idea of a...
Mark has hit on the clever idea of using the body tag's id attribute to apply different styles to different pages all from the same stylesheet. The technique is very neat, but it would be even neater ...
Lots of people said it couldn't be done (myself included), but evidently we were wrong. Joe Gillespie shows how to achieve vertical centering with CSS in the latest edition of WPDFD. Via Craig Saila, ...
In Who dropped the deat cat into the well? (via Mark Pilgrim), Brian Donovan argues that keeping web site content in (X)HTML is a fundamentally bad idea. I thoroughly disagree. When I started this web...
In A Touch of Class, Tantek continues his series of tips on writing better semantic markup and then issues a challenge: find related improvements that can be made to his blog. I couldn't find anything...
It's great to see the Creative Commons getting an overwhelmingly positive reception - as Lessig says on his blog, 'Tis the season to be giving, and this will be a great gift to the Commons. If you hav...
Coursework continues, but I'm taking a quick break to blog the fact that Tony Bowden has changed the CSS style for blockquotes on Understanding Nothing. This may not be earth shattering news, but con...
Mental note: add the rel="bookmark" attribute to my permalinks, as recommended by Tantek. I'd never realised the rel attribute could be applied to normal hyperlinks....
Mark Pilgrim pretty much single handedly killed the discussion thread on syndicating weblog content with XHTML started a few days ago by Anil Dash. Stuart's reply to Mark's post is definitely worth a ...
Spotted on the Web Manager's Weblog, centricle : css filters is a list of all of the current CSS browser hiding techniques (all 17 of them!) along with a table showing which hack will hide things from...
Hixie and Aaron Swartz are debating Hixie's infamous Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful on a W3C mailing list. While I am just as guilty of sending XHTML as text/html as anyone else (I've b...
Hixie has put together a fascinating article describing how the Mozilla, Opera 7 beta and IE6 DOMs deal with incorrectly nested HTML tags. Internet Explorer goes as far as creating a malformed tree ju...
The hack we've all been waiting for: How to hide CSS from OmniWeb. OmniWeb is a Mac browser which understands the @import rule but horribly mangles CSS layouts beyond all repair. Thanks to this hack C...
An Introduction to the DOM Inspector (via Scott Andrew). The DOM inspector is a powerful but little-known tool that comes packaged with Mozilla and can be used to interactively browse through the DOM ...
Stuart has released aqTree3, an upgrade to previous aqTree versions which takes in to account some of the best ideas from both Eric Meyer's pure CSS menus and Dave Lindquist's recently released drop-d...
Jeffrey Zeldman points to the newly redesigned v-2 Organisation site, which features a clever technique whereby a large background image is displayed "widescreen" style with different amounts of the p...
I've been helping my girlfriend recreate her site using CSS and structural markup. She's new to web design and has been taking to CSS like a duck to water - as a veteran of Microsoft Word globally def...
Inline XML explains how different XML languages can be embedded in XHTML documents using namespaces, and how they can then by styled using CSS....
Joe Gillespie has been introducing CSS to the readers of Web Page Design for Designers.
CSS Positioning - How the browsers cope (from September) discusses browser support and explains Joe's exper...
Jeffrey Zeldman has resolved his niggling CSS bugs, and posted the workarounds for all to see. What's amazing and unprecedented about CSS layout is that it's completely abstracted from the data it pre...
Craig Saila has launched his latest project, Trade by Numbers, which uses valid code and (Netscape 4 friendly) CSS for layout. The CSS code is worth looking over for the intelligent use of browser hac...
Apple have an excellent site called Internet Developer, with articles covering a wide range of web development topics from HTML and CSS right through to Using SOAP with PHP....
Jeffrey Zeldman's new design continues to develop, but remains virtually unreadable on my monitor (without extensive tweaking of the settings). I'm not griping though as this was an ideal opportunity ...
Spotted in Ordinary Life's new bookmarks, the Web Style Guide is a full online book covering all kinds of different aspects of web design. I've only glanced through it so far but it appears to have so...
Introduction to CSS shorthand properties (via webgraphics, via Glish)....
I'm not sure when it happened, but Opera.com has been redesigned (since the last time I checked the site). The new layout is done with valid XHTML and CSS but is decidedly tabular in appearance, demon...
Eric Meyer on CSS: Tricking Browsers and Hiding Styles. This bonus chapter which was not included in the book explains the various techniques that can be used to hide CSS rules from browsers, includin...
Dave Winer: What is Tag Soup?
They've already lost the argument. The Web is tag soup. People use blockquotes to indent. Even though the REST folk argue that it's anti-Web to do RPC, people do RPC...
Wired have redesigned, and now boast one of the snazziest CSS layouts on the web. The redesign is explained in A Site for Your Eyes, and has already drawn commentary from Jeffrey Zeldman and Mark Pilg...
The css-discuss wiki has finally gone live to the public. Here's my message to the mailing list announcing the launch....
Eric Meyer now has permalinks! Now if he would only start pinging weblogs.com when he updated I (and many others) could add him to their blo.gs-powered blogroll.
The other day I complained about KP...
Leonard Lin has a new HipTop - a hand-held wireless device for browsing the internet. His description of how well different sites work in the device makes for depressing reading. Blogs constructed wit...
Adrian Holovaty advocates the usage of next/previous link elements on newspaper sites to add optional linear navigation. His comments include some interesting discussions on whether or not this featur...
In CSS Design: Taming Lists, Mark Newhouse explains in detail every CSS list trick in the book, including inline lists, nested breadcrumbs and a variety of other useful techniques. He also links to Er...
Adrian Holovaty: CSS in the real world. Adrian uses CSS to reduce the markup for a list of news headlines by 75%:
Which code would you rather work in when there are four breaking news stories on th...
DENG (via WaSP) is a W3C compliant XHTML/CSS/XForms rendering engine written entirely in Flash MX Actionscript.
Updated 27th July 2006: Link no longer points at a domain squatter....
Peter-Paul Koch explains graceful degradation in Fluid Thinking:
Think fluid. The WWW isn't a fixed medium. It's unpredictable. It will do unexpected things to your site, and the best you can do ...
Cameron Barrett is back from Russia and brings photos. Scott Andrew is back from his summer vacation and brings CSS tips. I am back at University and stuck without bandwidth for the next few weeks....
Flash Voodoo's Battle of the Flash Text Editor Components (via Jeremy Allaire) is interesting - the editors are all good, but they all suffer from the same problem in that the code they generate is pr...
Strange Mozilla bug: In some versions of Mozilla / Netscape 6+ <label> elements that have a float applied to them will vanish. Tom Gilder's test case can be viewed here. I tried it in Mozilla 1....
Randal Rust has posted an updated version of his excellent CSS forms demo. While exploring Randal's site I stumbled across ALPHABET SOUP: A web designer's journey to standards and accessibility, an ex...
A handy bookmarklet courtesy of Rick on the MACCAWS mailing list:
0){cs=!document.styleSheets[0].disabled;for(i=0;i<document.styleSheets.length;i++) document.styleSheets[i].disabled=cs;};void(cs...
Ian Hickson: Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful. Ian makes an excellent case for sticking with HTML 4.01 rather than upgrading to XHTML. Here's the killer point (at least for me):
Document...
The css-discuss Wiki has gone live - but only to list members. If you are on the list you will have received an email with instructions for accessing it. The Wiki should go live to non list members in...
Jeffrey Zeldman on fixing A List Apart for IE6:
MSIE6 has trouble calculating the heights of block level elements. Eddie Traversa discovered the browser was caching the values it calculated on one ...
Stuart has put together a nice demonstration of how Mozilla's CSS3 selectors can be used to automatically add icons to external links, in response to Mark Pilgrim's guide to achieving the same effect ...
Two gems from Jeffrey Zeldman: Show, don’t sell and Table Layouts, Revisited. An extract from the former:Take credit for what CSS has done. Don’t say: "Web standards did this." Do say: "We’ve se...
CSS Image Rollovers describes a brilliantly simple technique for creating the effect of an image rollover using only one image and no javascript. The effect works by creating a gif with a transparent ...
Hixie has posed a fiendish markup quiz - spot the four markup errors in a document that validates. It's harder than it sounds. I've mailed off my answers, but I'm not expecting to get full marks.
U...
css-discuss has seen some interesting threads in the past 24 hours and the new archive means I can link straight to them - so here goes. Kentaro Kaji kicked off the topic of techniques for aligning an...
Michael V has written a couple of functions to apply my CSS numbered code listing technique to PHP's built in syntax highlighting....
New CSS Experiment: Trickery with Floats and Negative Margins, inspired by this message on css-discuss. By applying both position: relative and a negative margin to a floated element it is possible to...
AlltheWeb.com introduced an innovative feature called Alchemist a while ago which allows visitors to customise the site by specifying the URL to their own style sheet. They have now announced a CSS de...
SitePoint are trialling a new design for their front page. For fun, I had a go at recreating the new design using structural XHTML and CSS. The result isn't my normal style (I normally avoid fixed pix...
Spotted in my referrals: tidak ada, a beautifully designed blog covering web development and other related topics. This is another great example of what you can achieve with some creative CSS....
After a successful private beta, the new searchable css-discuss archive is ready for use by the general public. If you spot any bugs or have any suggestions for improving the archive please drop me a ...
Phil Ringnalda is questioning the point of XHTML. The single, huge advantage it has over HTML is that XHTML can be parsed by anything (or any language) with an XML parser. As an example, a few weeks a...
I think I've kept quiet for long enough, so here are some details of the two projects I have alluded to. The first is a database driven mailing list archive for css-discuss. It has just gone in to pri...
Sjoerd Visscher has published an XHTML 2.0 page that works in IE6, Mozilla and Opera, complete with support for navigation lists and href attributes on multiple elements. The implementation is very cl...
Two more interesting CSS demonstrations - Bullet proof rounded corners and Breadcrumb nested lists. The rounded corners technique is very impressive - it solves a common CSS problem in a way that is d...
A few more notes on XHTML 2.0. Tom Gilder (who incidentally has written an excellent series of tips on accessible scripting) has pointed out that the <dfn> tag is part of HTML4 and corrected my ...
The W3C have published a working draught of XHTML 2.0. Since the Changes from XHTML 1.1 pages doesn't appear to have been written yet, here are a few of the most notable differences I've spotted so fa...
text-decoration: blink spotted in the wild!. Seeing as Hixie so eloquently argued for its inclusion in Mozilla in the first place it's nice to see this most vital of CSS properties being put to some u...
Take a look at this page in Mozilla, view the source code and ask yourself "how on earth did he do that?". It appears to involve very creative use of borders, possibly relating to the fact that a sing...
I'm slowly working my way through both Eric Meyer on CSS and CSS: Separating Content From Presentation. Initial impressions are that they were well worth the money - the two books complement each othe...
My Amazon order has arrived....
Real World Style: These techniques work. I know, because I use them every day in my real world job. Mark Newhouse provides a whole site dedicated to CSS tips, tricks and full blown public domain layou...
placenamehere.com: Chris Casciano's Digital Playground. I love this design - Chris uses beautiful black and white photos for page backgrounds and carefully positions the main navigational element on e...
I've been messing around with CSS today, trying to convert this page to use standards compliant CSS and XHTML while keeping the overall look and feel. My efforts so far can be seen here - I've knocked...
Since it took me a while to find this page today, here is it for future reference. Westciv's Guide to CSS Selectors is an excellent explanation of selectors, a key element of CSS. A good understandin...
Killer CSS link: Position Is Everything, part of the CSS bug ring. Big John on CSS-Discuss is probably the single most helpful individual I have ever encountered on a mailing list - he explains the mo...
Tim Luoma on thelist poined out this table, which details the media types that can be used when serving XHTML documents. The table shows that XHTML 1.1 should not be served with a text/html Content-Ty...
The ODP require you to display an attribution on any page that reuses ODP data. The recommended attribution fails to validate as XHTML, so I created an XHTML compliant alternative which looks visually...
I've seen a few questions on various forums and mailing lists asking if there is a way of using target="blank" on links in XHTML Strict without running in to a validation error. I've put together an e...
Craig Saila's Web Building Tips include all kinds of frequently asked but infrequently answered questions relating to various areas (mostly client side) of web design and development. The rest of the ...
Fantastic news for the web standards movement: Lycos Europe goes XHTML and CSS for layout (via Zeldman and the W3C evangelism mailing list). The new layout can be seen here - at the time of writing it...
Floats, an alternative perspective. A useful overview of how CSS floats should work based on the specification....
I've placed an order on Amazon for both Cascading Stylesheets: Seperating Content from Presentation and Eric Meyer on CSS. I'll probably post a side-by-side comparison of the two books in a few weeks ...
If you're still struggling to get to grips with CSS layout techniques (heaven knows I am) Dorothea's latest will teach you more in a single post than many lengthy tutorials do in their entirety. Float...
Stuart Langridge discusses the nature of minimalism and CSS design, following a post by Sarabian. Stuart wonders if the current trend for relatively plain site designs is an interim period while we fi...
Dashes and hyphens in HTML....
Chris Smith has an interesting set of CSS demos, including some attractive CSS buttons and an excellent example of a more complex layout. There's a lot of interesting creative work going on with CSS a...
Things I learnt today part two: The <link> tag is fun. I've been building support for it in to IncDirectory (not long now) - it took a while to find the necessary background information but Mark...
Things I learnt today part one: Nested lists in XHTML are possible, but you can't just put a list inside another list. You have to nest the nested list in a list item. References: W3Schools XHTML diff...
In a discussion on css-discuss recently about underlines a on links, I pointed to kottke.org as an example of clever use of CSS for links where by the link underline is a slightly later colour than th...
Mark has out-done himself today with his long awaited coverage of relative font sizes. This is a notoriously tough topic (thanks to a whole bunch of strange CSS bugs and browser differences) but Mark ...
Lobowalk is a "somewhat daily" blog that has just made the transition to using CSS for layout. The decision to go CSS was accompanied by an excellent rant:Why am I doing this? Because right now the we...
I've been experimenting with using CSS and <ol> tags to format code listings, complete with line numbering. Here's what I've got so far: Numbered Code Listing Experiment....
Mark says that today is the most important day of his whole accessibility series, and who are we to argue? The topic is the alt attribute for images, and the message is simple: Every image should have...
Courtesy of css-discuss: Two examples of expanding boxes in CSS with images in the corners, ideal for that trendy rounded corner effect: One and Two. Mozilla has experimental support for rounded corne...
Today's tip from Mark informs us that "real" lists are good for accessibility. They are also fantastic for writing maintainable code. Thanks to CSS, a humble unordered list can be transformed with cus...
Jodi Bollaert: Using Web widgets wisely. This is first in a two part series explaining the best practise for designing user interfaces using the form elements available in HTML....
Caveat Lector: <em>, <strong>, and markup assumptions. Dorothea Salo explains these semantic tags, why they exist and when they should be used, and throws in a bit of HTML history as well....
A few useful links spotted on css-discuss:
A javascript fix to make IE support the position:fixed CSS property. This is really clever, if a tiny bit jerky. the author has also created several other...
Mark has been educating us on the accessible way of marking up tables, with particular reference to calendar tables on blogs. My blog doesn't have a calendar (yet, I'm considering adding one) but Mark...
The latest issue of Digital Web Magazine is out, and it includes an excellent case study on redesigning a table based layout to use CSS: Web Page Reconstruction with CSS. They also have a review of Er...
Spotted on MeyerWeb: Eric Meyer on CSS has been released. This is one book I'm really looking forward to getting (at least when I can afford it) - Eric is one of the world's leading authorities on CSS...
SitePoint have a good new article on CSS layout, which includes some useful tips on how to use position: float and position: absolute to create columns on a page, as well as some tips on providing Net...
Via Brett Merkey on CSS Discuss: Dot Leaders without Tables. Dot Leaders is a publishing term that describes the rows of dots frequently used in tables of contents to connect a chapter title with its ...
Mark's accessibility tips are getting harder. Today we are advised to Present our main content first in our source code. This benefits both text based browsers and search engines such as Google. Mark ...
I've signed up for a new mailing list (probably not a good idea, I'm getting over 200 mails a day which isn't much fun on a modem) - XHTML-L, which describes itself as A forum for discussing XHTML iss...
Mark Pilgrim's accessiblity series continues: Day 7: Identifying your language. Since I'm using XHTML 1.0 I've changed my opening <html> tag to the following:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.or...
More CSS layout fun courtesy of Webdesign-L. This time Steve Clay has taken Anil Dash's standards compliant Amazon and reworked it to use CSS for layout. Unfortunately it is likely to be a while befo...
Mark Pilgrim starts his series of weblog accessibility tips today with tutorial on adding a doctype to a blog....
Interesting thread today on css-discuss about styling <hr> elements. I had tried this before with no luck, but the thread provided some useful tips. Marek Prokop provided this tutorial, and Kevi...
Micah S Sittig on css-discuss has created an alternative version of the new Yahoo site design using CSS for layout instead of tables. The aim of the excercise was to demonstrate how much code can be s...
I've been looking at PHP's XML handling functions (in particular the xml_parse() function) and I've suddenly realised the advantages of writing entries in valid XHTML. Before I started this blog one o...
The road to validity is frought with peril. I've just fixed another small group of errors that were preventing this page from validating (after spotting the ominous W3C validator in today's user-agent...
Anil Dash provides a copy of Amazon's home page in HTML 4.0 Transitional, and it validates. Solid proof that you can rewrite a complex ecommerce site in valid HTML, and another victory for the web sta...