10 Best Resources for CSS 344
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."
Re:A list of the site links? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A list of the site links? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:But they forgot.. (Score:5, Informative)
CSS Cheat Sheet (Score:5, Informative)
May I also recommend Dave Child's CSS Cheat Sheet [ilovejackdaniels.com] ?
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 [ilovejackdaniels.com] if you're interested.
can I add one? (Score:5, Informative)
CSS Sidebar for Mozilla/Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
pwnd. (Score:2, Informative)
also here's a few interesting links bookmarks [alvit.de] layouts [thenoodleincident.com] more layouts [bluerobot.com]
Re:But they forgot.. (Score:2, Informative)
Best - NCDesign.org (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The REAL news ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No CSS on that site. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No CSS on that site. (Score:2, Informative)
Moderators, you didn't get the joke (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The REAL news ... (Score:2, Informative)
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" >
Re:CSS Cheat Sheet (Score:2, Informative)
(They also make a good JavaScript card from which I learned most of my JavaScript, as well as those nifty color charts.)
The problem is browsers, not CSS (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Trying to understand CSS... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:The REAL news ... (Score:3, Informative)
Some more for you web-design junkies (Score:1, Informative)
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 [meyerweb.com] presentation, and, well, check out his site [meyerweb.com], definitely worth a read.
Well, that's it, other's that I know of have already been posted.
Essential Bookmarks For Web Developers (Score:2, Informative)
quirksmode (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The REAL news ... (Score:5, Informative)
See CmdrTaco's journal [slashdot.org]
Re:No CSS on that site. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Take a step back and re-evaluate CSS (Score:2, Informative)
css attributes reference (Score:3, Informative)
Re:CSS tables (Score:5, 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.
Re:CSS tables (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:Keep it simple stupid... (Score:2, Informative)
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".
Re:-moz-stylings (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Take a step back and re-evaluate CSS (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:CSS tables (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Take a step back and re-evaluate CSS (Score:3, Informative)
Recoding a web site in CSS (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Firefox users; a handy extension to help learn CSS (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Take a step back and re-evaluate CSS (Score:1, Informative)
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.