Recreating the button. Fascinating article from Doug Bowman on the work that went in to creating custom CSS buttons for use across Google’s different applications, avoiding images to improve performance ensure they could be easily styled using just CSS. I’d love to see the Google Code team turn this in to a full open source release—the more sites using these buttons the more familiar they will become to users at large.
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Filament Group has an article on buttons created with the jQuery UI CSS framework. Their examples don't include a flipped-background-image-on-hover, but that could easily be added using ThemeRoller.
The markup is much lighter, avoiding the need to generate it, be it templates on the server or via JavaScript. You just add a few classes to your element. And there are just five images for the full example set, including the icon sprite that Themeroller generates.
And it's already open-source.
Jörn Zaefferer - 5th February 2009 23:04 - #