Sizing text in pixels can cause many problems for web developers – especially in Internet Explorer. Author Dan Cederholm shows you the best practices for sizing fonts…
Direct link: How To Provide a Flexible Base for Text
Monthly Archives: January 2010
10 Tips for Better Print Style Sheets
Print style sheets have been somewhat forgotten, and yet they remain important all the same. Many people print out articles to read while traveling or when they have no access to the Internet.
Print style sheets have definite benefits. For example, reading on paper is less tiring on the eyes than reading on screen.
Also, following tutorials is easier if you have one next to you, with your code editor open on the screen; that way, you don’t have to switch windows every time to look something up.
In this article we’ll point out 10 easy tips that will help you create better print style sheets.
Direct link: 10 Tips for Better Print Style Sheets
How to Make a CSS Sprite Powered Menu
Today’s tutorial will bring you through the process of building a slick menu using a single CSS sprite image. It’s a simple, but elegant solution for most websites. This was one of the design strategies that first helped me to start using smarter markup. For those of you just getting introduced to this technique today, hopefully you’ll have some similar results…
Direct link: How to Make a CSS Sprite Powered Menu
IE Background RGB Bug
Using RGBa for progressive enhancement is getting more and more popular, which is awesome. Even nearly a year ago it was pretty much ready to rock. A great way to handle the progressive enhancement part is just to declare a fallback color before the RGBa value, so older browsers that don’t support it will get a solid color version…
Direct link: IE Background RGB Bug
CSS3 box-shadow and Image Hover Effects
The CSS3 box-shadow property is a new way of adding drop shadow effects just by editing a style sheet. There’s no need to use Photoshop! Just open your style sheet in a text editor and away you go. Well, it’s almost as simple as that but not quite. There’s one caveat and that is browser support. The box-shadow property is supported by Firefox and Safari (and Google Chrome), using the proprietary -moz- and -webkit- prefixes, but it’s not supported by Internet Explorer (or other browsers). For this reason, I think the box-shadow property is ideal for adding image link hover effects where the shadow is not absolutely essential but where it provides a nice style enhancement (enrichment) for modern browsers…
Direct link: CSS3 box-shadow and Image Hover Effects
The Mysterious Pseudo Class in CSS
Pseudo classes are those things with colons in them, you know, like :hover or :link. They let you control the CSS of stuff in different forms, states and places easily and efficiently, without taking up too much room. CSS3 is going to introduce a ton of new pseudo classes, and they’re going to make our lives a lot easier if you take browser compatibility out of the equation. They help both aesthetics and usability, and can make things that were once hard easier than ever before…
Direct link: The Mysterious Pseudo Class in CSS
CSS Transitions 101
Despite people’s expectation of change and movement on the screen, CSS and HTML have few controls that allow you to design interactivity, and those that exist are binary.
A link is either one color or another. A text field is either one size or another. A photo is either transparent or opaque. No in-betweens from one state to the next. No transitions.
This has led to most web pages feeling abrupt, with elements shifting and changing ungracefully.
What we need is a quick and easy way to add simple transitions to the page and in this article you’ll find useful information about CSS transitions and how to use them.
Direct link: CSS Transitions 101
The Demise of CSS: Why Sass and Languages Like it Will Triumph
Sass is essentially a programming language for designers. It is extremely limited when compared with other languages, but it does a magnificent job of translating the core concepts of a programming language in a way that makes sense for styling a document…
Direct link: The Demise of CSS: Why Sass and Languages Like it Will Triumph
IE CSS3 pseudo selectors
e-css3.js allows Internet Explorer to identify CSS3 pseudo selectors and render any style rules defined with them. Simply include the script in your pages and start using these selectors in your style sheets and they’ll work in IE…
Direct link: IE CSS3 pseudo selectors
CSS charts – Bar Charts Created with Pure CSS
For ultimate performance try these really fast bar charts that don’t need any plugins or rely heavily on JavaScript. Just pure and wholesome bar charts in CSS…
Direct link: CSS charts – Bar Charts Created with Pure CSS