CSS Head

Experienced developers understand that CSS3 can be added to new projects with progressive enhancement in mind. This ensures that content is accessible while non-supportive browsers fall back to a less-enhanced experience for the user. But developers could face a situation where a client insists that the enhancements work cross-browser, demanding support even for IE6. In that case, I’ve collected together a number of options that developers can consider for those circumstances where support for a CSS3 feature is required for all versions of Internet Explorer IE6, IE7, and IE8 – all of which are still currently in significant use…

The evolution of Internet technologies never ceases to amaze. Seemingly daily, new concepts and techniques are being thought up by creative and talented people. With modern browsers being adopted at a greater rate, systems like CSS3 are becoming more and more viable for use on projects of all sizes. Clearly, this can be seen by looking at new services sprouting on-line like TypeKit. Conceptually, if we deconstruct a font down to it’s basic elements, we can make use of this technology for things other than type, icons…

A demo page with a set of beautiful CSS3 buttons by Nick La of WebDesignerWall…

Having marvelled at David Desandro’s Opera Logo made entirely in HTML and CSS, I wanted to try a similar experiment for myself. So with a large scoop of border-radius I set about trying to create various “common” icons that could be used in your web apps…

With all these CSS3 effects and tutorials popping up every day that show all the new and wonderful things we can make happen, we sometimes forget about poor little old CSS2.1 and the great potential it still has.With very good browser support, we can do lots of cool things that we know will work in all major browsers. In this tutorial, I will be going over creating flexible advanced hover techniques using CSS2.1 properties…

The CSS gradient feature was introduced by Webkit for about two years but was rarely used due to incompatibility with most browers. But now with the Firefox 3.6+, which supports gradient, we can style create gradient without having to create an image. This post will show you how to code for the CSS gradient to be supported by the major browsers: IE, Firefox 3.6+, Safari, and Chrome…

IE6 has become the source of our frustrations — and for certain sites, giving it an unstyled, naked view is exactly what I want to do. Alpha-channel PNGs, min-width, max-width, rendering bugs galore — there are plenty of sites I’ve designed and maintain where the IE6 stats are low enough to drop the axe and move on. Now is the time! We can use conditional comments to hide styles from IE6 only…

The “C” in CSS stands for cascading. This means that that style rules that show up later in the stylesheet will override rules which appear earlier. But this isn’t always the case. There’s something else you have to take into consideration, as well: specificity…

What seems to be an ideal chunk of CSS code for implementing the @font-face rules. Tested on quite a few browsers, including the following:

Safari 3.1+, Opera 10+, Firefox 3.5+, Chrome 4.0+, Internet Explorer 6+

This technique delivers your custom fonts quite consistently to all of these browsers, and degrades gracefully for those that don’t support it. I share it here hoping it will help others implement custom @font-face fonts quickly and easily. Let’s step to it…

Too often, authors trigger hasLayout without thinking of adding the necessary styling to create the same rendering across all browsers. Because of this, they end up adding IE specific declarations to “patch” their styling. This does not mean we should avoid clearfix at all costs though. It is a great tool which is safe to use as long as we remember that besides containing floats, it may also prevent collapsing margins and will “escape” surrounding floats in IE…