Articles tagged as “css”

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CSS3 + Progressive Enhancement = Smart Design

Progressive enhancement is a good thing, and CSS3 is even better. Combined, they enable designers to create lighter, cleaner websites faster and easier than ever before.. CSS3 can do some pretty amazing stuff: text shadows, rgba transparency, multiple background images, embedded fonts, and tons more. It’s awesome, but not all browsers are up to snuff. As designers, it’s up to us to ...

3 Ways to Preload Images with CSS, JavaScript, or Ajax

Preloading images is a great way to improve the user experience. When images are preloaded in the browser, the visitor can surf around your site and enjoy extremely faster loading times. This is especially beneficial for photo galleries and other image-heavy sites where you want to deliver the goods as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Preloading images definitely helps users without broadband enjoy a better experience when viewing your content. In this article, we’ll explore three different preloading techniques to enhance the performance and usability of your site. Method 1: Preloading with CSS and JavaScript There are many ways to preload images, including methods that rely on CSS, JavaScript, and ...

Really Simple Browser Detection with jQuery

For my Serious redesign, I push the envelope in terms of CSS’ advanced selector functionality. Stuff like: p:first-child p:first-child:first-letter p:first-child:after p:first-child:first-line Plus lots of other stylistic tricks that require CSS3 support in order to display as intended. Fortunately, most of the browsers to which I am catering with this new design have no problems with most of the advanced stuff. Of course, Internet Explorer chokes on just about everything, but fortunately IE’s proprietary conditional comments make it easy to fix things up with some “special” styles:...

The New Clearfix Method

Say goodbye to the age-old clearfix hack and hello to the new and improved clearfix method.. The clearfix hack, or “easy-clearing” hack, is a useful method of clearing floats. I have written about the original method and even suggested a few improvements. The original clearfix hack works great, but the browsers that it targets are either obsolete or well on their way. Specifically, Internet Explorer 5 for Mac is now history, so there is no reason to bother with it when using ...

Perfect Pre Tags

If you operate a website that features lots of code examples, you know how important it is to spend some quality time styling the element. When left unstyled, wild tags will mangle your preformatted content and destroy your site’s layout. Different browsers treat the tag quite differently, varying greatly in their default handling of font-sizing, scrollbar-rendering, and word-wrapping. Indeed, getting your preformatted code to look consistent, usable, and stylish across browsers is no easy task, but it certainly can be done. In this article, I’ll show you everything you need to create perfect tags. First thangs first Before getting into it, let’s take a moment to ensure we’re all ...

Sexy HTML List Tricks

Behold the ubiquitous list elements, and ! These two sexy elements help millions of websites display lists of information in clean, semantic fashion. Without them, we’d be crawling around like filthy cavemen, eating dirt and howling at the moon. But these list elements aren’t just sexy, they are also extremely flexible, enabling us humble designers to create robust list configurations that are semantically versatile and highly customizable. We all know how to throw down a basic list: Pancakes Bananas Monkeys Or even throw down some hardcore nested-list action: Pancakes Swedish Blueberry Chocolate Bananas Manzano Plantain Cavendish Monkeys Spider Howler Squirrel This nested list markup will result in a unordered bulleted parent list with numerically ordered nested lists, resulting in something like this in a browser: Pancakes Swedish Blueberry Chocolate Bananas Manzano Plantain Cavendish Monkeys Spider Howler Squirrel Of course, we ...

The 5-Minute CSS Mobile Makeover

More people are surfing the Web via mobile device than ever before. It’s just so convenient to have that mobile access to anything you need. Sadly, most websites have not yet considered their mobile visitors, who probably move on to the next site before trying to make sense of a jumbled mess. Those of you who surf the Mobile Web know exactly what I’m talking about here: sites that “get it” are a joy to visit, but those that don’t are a total pain. What’s to get? Well, for one, if you do nothing else for your mobile visitors, take five minutes and implement a basic stylesheet to make your site ...

The Power of HTML 5 and CSS 3

Web designers can do some pretty cool stuff with HTML 4 and CSS 2.1. We can structure our documents logically and create information-rich sites without relying on archaic, table-based layouts. We can style our web pages with beauty and detail without resorting to inline and tags. Indeed, our current design methods have taken us far beyond the hellish era of browser wars, proprietary protocols, and those hideous flashing, scrolling, and blinking web pages. As far as we’ve come using HTML 4 and CSS 2.1, however, we can do better. We can refine the structure of our ...

CSS Hacks for Different Versions of Firefox

In a perfect world, I don’t use CSS hacks, and certainly don’t recommend them. In the unpredictable, chaos of the real world, however, there are many situations where applying styles to particular browsers is indeed the optimal solution. Most of the time, I am targeting or filtering Internet Explorer (because it is so incredibly awesome), but occasionally I need to tweak something in a modern browser like Firefox, Safari, or Opera. In this article, we’ll look at CSS hacks targeting different versions of Firefox. Some of these CSS hacks don’t validate, others are proprietary, and ...

9 Ways to Set Dynamic Body IDs via PHP and WordPress

When designing sites, it is often useful to identify different pages by adding an ID attribute to the element. Commonly, the name of the page is used as the attribute value, for example: In this case, “about” would be the body ID for the “About” page, which would be named something like “about.php”. Likewise, other pages would have unique IDs as well, for example: ..again, with each ID associated with the name of the page. This identification strategy is useful for a variety of reasons, including the following: Page-specific control over CSS via descendant selectors Page-specific DOM manipulation via ...

Getting Naked on My Birthday

In celebration of CSS Naked Day, Perishable Press has disabled it’s CSS stylesheet for today, April 9th, 2009 (which also happens to be my 37th birthday)! What are you waiting for? Go get naked!! ;)

Perishable Press Featured at CSS Perk!

Yet another fine reason to celebrate the current Quintessential theme design here at Perishable Press is graciously provided by the fine folks at CSS Perk. CSS Perk features a growing collection of superior CSS-designed websites, and is always a great source of inspiration and ideas for new design projects. Seeing my current theme showcased at CSS Perk is very inspiring, and a super-cool way to celebrate my upcoming April-9th birthday. Many thanks to the awesome peeps at CSS Perk for sharing ...

The Voice of the World Wide Web (Consortium)

Check out this sweet composition of aural styles discovered in the stylesheet for the W3C’s website: /* AURAL STYLES (via W3C) */ @media aural { h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { voice-family: paul, male; stress: 20; richness: 90 } h1 { pitch: x-low; pitch-range: 90 } h2 { pitch: x-low; pitch-range: 80 } h3 { pitch: low; pitch-range: 70 } ...

Better WordPress Archives via Dynamic Triple Column Layout

Here at Perishable Press, the number of posts listed in my archives is rapidly approaching the 700 mark. While this is good news in general, displaying such a large number of posts in an effective, user-friendly fashion continues to prove challenging. Unfortunately, my current strategy of simply dumping all posts into an unordered list just isn’t working. I think it’s fair to say that archive lists containing more than like 50 or 100 post titles are effectively useless and nothing more than a usability nightmare. With growing numbers of blogs building ...

Cross-Browser Transparency via CSS

Shortest post ever! You can quickly and easily apply transparency to any supportive element by adding the following CSS code your stylesheet: selector { filter: alpha(opacity=50); /* internet explorer */ -khtml-opacity: 0.5; /* khtml, old safari */ -moz-opacity: 0.5; /* mozilla, netscape */ opacity: 0.5; /* fx, safari, opera */ } Check the code comments to see what’s doing what, and feel free to adjust the level of transparency by editing the various property values. Also, remember to replace “selector” with the target element of your choice. By the way, I’ve got a metric tonne ...

Better Image Caching with CSS

I have written previously on the fine art of preloading images without JavaScript using only CSS. These caching techniques have evolved in terms of effectiveness and accuracy, but may be improved further to allow for greater cross-browser functionality. In this post, I share a “CSS-only” preloading method that works better under a broader set of conditions. Previous image-preloading techniques target all browsers, devices, and media types. Unfortunately, certain browsers do not load images that are hidden directly (via ...

Unobtrusive JavaScript: 5 Ways to Remove Unwanted Focus Outlines

I recently wrote about how to remove unwanted link outlines using a pure-CSS method that works on every modern browser except (wait for it) ..Internet Explorer 6! Yes, that’s right, another reason why (almost) everyone is pushing hard to eliminate Internet Explorer from existence. Nonetheless, removing those pesky unwanted link outlines in IE6 is not possible with CSS, but it’s a snap with a little JavaScript. Here are four unobtrusive JavaScript techniques (plus one CSS-only ...

Perishable Press Featured at Divine CSS!

Yay! Perishable Press is now featured at one of my favorite CSS-design showcase sites, Divine CSS! Divine CSS features a mouth-watering collection of CSS and Flash-based website designs, and is always a great source of inspiration and ideas for new projects. Seeing my current theme (Quintessential) showcased at Divine CSS is very inspiring, and a nice way to celebrate the (relatively) new design. Many thanks to the fine folks at Divine CSS for ...

Perfect Rounded Corners with CSS

A great way to enhance the visual appearance of various block-level elements is to use a “rounded-corder” effect. For example, throughout the current design for this site, I am using rounded corners on several different types of elements, including image borders, content panels, and even pre-formatted code blocks. Some of these rounded-corner effects are accomplished via multiple s and a few background images, while others are created strictly with CSS. Of these two different methods, extra images and markup are used whenever I need the rounded corners to appear in ...

The Ultimate Guide to swfIR Image Replacement

In this ultimate guide to swfIR, you will learn how to use swfIR to replace your ordinary images with richer, stylized graphics. swfIR enables efficient, practical and scalable application of drop-shadows, rounded corners, and even image rotation to any number of specified images throughout your site. From concept and application to examples and recipes, this guide covers everything you need for successful swfIR implementation. The Challenge.. There are many ways to enhance the visual presentation of your images. Popular visual effects include rounded corners, drop shadows, and image ...

CSS Implementations of the Rich and Famous

A great way to improve your CSS skills is to check out the stylesheets used by other websites. Digging behind the scenes and exploring some applied CSS provides new ideas and insights about everything from specificity and formatting to hacks and shortcuts. Learning CSS by reading about ideal cases and theoretical applications is certainly important, but actually seeing how the language is applied in “real-world” scenarios provides first-hand knowledge and insight. While there are millions of standards-based, CSS-designed ...

Pure CSS: Remove Link Properties for Linked Images with Borders

There are many ways to style images with CSS. You can add borders: img { border: thin solid black } ..padding and margins: img { border: thin solid black padding: 3px; margins: 3px; } ..and even background graphics: img { background: url(images/grunge.png) repeat 0 0; border: thin solid black padding: 3px; margins: 3px; } You can also use images as links to other images: If so, you will probably want to style your links: a:link, a:visited { border-bottom: 1px solid red; text-decoration: underline; color: red; } a:hover, a:active { border-bottom: 3px solid red; text-decoration: none; color: maroon; } But wait! By styling your text links you are also styling your image links, leaving them with unwanted bottom-borders and text-underlines. Assuming we want to fix this, a quick search on the ...

IE6 Support Spectrum

I know, I know, not another post about IE6! I actually typed this up a couple of weeks ago while immersed in my site redesign project. I had recently decided that I would no longer support that terrible browser, and this tangential post just kind of “fell out.” I wasn’t sure whether or not to post it, but I recently decided to purge my draft stash by posting everything for your reading pleasure. Thus, you may see a few turds in the next few weeks, but hopefully this ...

How to Deal with IE 6 after Dropping Support

As announced at IE Death march, I recently dropped support for Internet Explorer 6. As newer versions of Firefox, Opera, and Safari (and others) continue to improve consistency and provide better support for standards-based techniques, having to carry IE 6 along for the ride — for any reason — is painful. Thanks to the techniques described in this article, I am free to completely ignore (figuratively and literally) IE 6 when developing and designing websites. Now that I have dropped support for IE 6, I feel liberated, free of the constraints that once enslaved my time, energy, ...

Beware of Margins or Padding when Using the min-width Hack for IE

While we all watch as Internet Explorer 6 dies a slow, painful death, many unfortunate designers and developers continue to find themselves dealing with IE6’s lack of support for simple things like minimum and maximum widths. Fortunately, there are solutions to this problem, primarily in the form of CSS expressions such as this: /* set the minimum width for IE 6 */ #target_element { width: expression((document.body.clientWidth < 335)? "333px" : "auto"); /* min-width for IE6 */ min-width: 333px; /* min-width for all standards-compliant ...