202 posts tagged “css”
2007
start.gotapi.com. Lightning fast lookups of API documentation; includes Python docs, YUI, HTML, CSS and lots more.
dojo.query: A CSS Query Engine For Dojo. I incorrectly criticised Dojo for not having a CSS node selection tool in my talk yesterday; not sure how I missed this.
Guardian Unlimited’s new look: Some background on templating. Nik Silver describes some of the challenges involved in building a complex new homepage using CSS and Velocity.
CSS2.2. Andy Budd points out that CSS hasn’t had an update since 1998, and suggests rolling the most obviously useful parts of CSS 3 in to an incremental CSS 2.2.
Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid. Wilson Miner introduces a smart, methodical approach to well proportioned Web typography.
CSS Naked Day. Today is CSS naked day. Get naked!
The problem with pixels. IE7 lets users resize pixel-based fonts. Is it finally time to stop avoiding pixel sizing in CSS?
JavaScript/CSS Font Detector (via) Really clever trick: detects the fonts that you have installed by writing out some text and measuring its dimensions.
soupselect. My simple extension to BeautifulSoup that allows you to grab elements using CSS selectors; should be useful for parsing microformats.
Rails 1.2.1 Impression. I hadn’t seen assert_select before, which lets you unit test generated HTML using CSS selectors; a really neat idea.
Em Calculator. Tool for working out CSS relative em values, useful for creating completely resizable layouts.
MySpace: Too Much of a Good Thing? CSS customization really was just the result of forgetting to strip HTML. They “eventually” decided to filter out JavaScript(!)
CSS library for Python (via) “A Python package to parse and build CSS Cascading Style Sheets. Partly implements the DOM Level 2 Style Stylesheets and CSS interfaces.”
Microsoft Breaks HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 2007. They’ve dropped the IE renderer and replaced it with... Microsoft Word! No CSS background images, no floats, no CSS positioning, no forms. Wow.
2006
Introducing text-stroke. Webkit has some sexy new CSS properties: -webkit-text-fill-color, -webkit-text-stroke-color, -webkit-text-stroke-width.
Conditionally Sticky Sidebar. A nicer implementation of the trick I’m using for my add comment form; this one takes advantage of position: fixed in browsers that support it.
RoundedCornr. Generates code for rounded corner boxes (with optional graded fills—very Web 2.0). Slightly different way of nesting divs to the way I’ve used in the past.
YUI CSS Grid builder (via) The YUI CSS grid system can be hard to get your head around. This interactive tool makes it much easier to figure out.
Natalie Downe: Inline image quotes. Neat CSS trick this one.
Mozilla causing XSS in Livejournal. Their recent worm attack was caused by the -moz-binding CSS property.
2005
Maintainability, a.k.a. the CSS elephant
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 maintainability.
[... 317 words]Firefox 1.5 developer highlights
Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is out, and is the most exciting browser release in a very long time. It comes with the Gecko 1.8 rendering engine, which includes a ton of interesting new features. New in this version (unless you’ve been tinkering with the Deer Park series):
[... 719 words]Internet Explorer 7. It’s been announced, but the stated focus is security and anti-phishing. No news on improved CSS.
Ned Batchelder: Css-discuss wiki. Ned says nice things about the Wiki.
2004
Wikipedia enhancements
I don’t know when it happened, but Wikipedia has a stylish new design in mostly valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional (the front page validates, some of the inside pages do not) with a CSS layout to boot. They even have an option to turn off the single layout table used on their home page. The site seems much easier to navigate now and the organisation of the front page is a masterpiece of information architecture. When you’ve got over 250,000 articles just in the English version providing a useful home page is going to be a challenge, but Wikipedia pulls it off with aplomb.
[... 220 words]Background Images Security Flaw? Styling :visited links can reveal a user’s browser history.
2003
Teaching CSS: there’s a long way to go
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 mastering CSS. When you’ve “got it”, it’s easy to forget how much of a paradigm shift it is away from old school table methods. Here’s an extract:
[... 314 words]Targetting CSS at IE5
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 the browsers with the broken box model (provided you trigger standards mode in IE 6).
[... 104 words]On CSS Remakes
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 site in CSS helps no one and can in fact have a negative affect on the CSS advocacy effort (the response to the article is summarised in his follow up post).
[... 356 words]