Perishable Press

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 decide which browsers to support for our projects. While everyone has their own particular strategy, [...] • Read more »

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 [...] • Read more »

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, [...] • Read more »

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 [...] • Read more »

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: [...] • Read more »

The “CSS Hackz Series” focuses on useful hacks, tricks, and workarounds for specific presentational and styling issues on various browsers. Although a majority of these articles provide solutions for Internet Explorer, other browsers are covered as well, either specifically or in general. The articles in the “Hackz” series are written to be as clear and concise as possible, focusing on application rather than theory. Thus, these posts cut right to the chase, presenting comprehensive methods and techniques [...] • Read more »

Continuing the CSS Hackz Series, I present a small army of hacks for targeting and filtering Internet Explorer 7! Here, “targeting” IE 7 means to deliver CSS and/or (X)HTML to IE 7 only, while “filtering” means to deliver CSS and/or (X)HTML to every browser that is not IE 7. In other words, targeting is to include (apply), filtering is to exclude (hide). Let’s dive right in.. Conditional Comments Conditional comments are a proprietary Microsoft technique for targeting and filtering different [...] • Read more »

I use the CSS clearfix hack on nearly all of my sites. The clearfix hack — also known as the “Easy Clearing Hack” — is used to clear floated divisions (divs) without using structural markup. It is very effective in resolving layout issues and browser inconsistencies without the need to mix structure with presentation. There are countless variations of the clearfix hack around the Web, and for some sad reason, I keep a file updated with all [...] • Read more »

In this CSS Hackz Series article, I outline several solutions for displaying alpha-transparent PNG (a.k.a. PNG-24 format) images in everybody’s favorite broken browser, Internet Explorer. Specifically, IE versions through 6 (excluding IE 5 for Mac) fail to support alpha-channel transparency for PNG images. In these versions of IE, every pixel containing alpha-transparency is displayed with an ugly, flat gray color. Fortunately, there are plenty of hacks and workarounds designed to “fix” IE’s PNG image-display problem. Unfortunately, every [...] • Read more »

Opening the CSS Hackz series is the infamous CSS-expression hack for achieving minimum and maximum widths in Internet Explorer 6. Here is how to set the maximum width for IE 6: #target_element { width: expression((document.body.clientWidth > 778)? “777px” : “auto”); max-width: 777px; } Here is how to set the minimum width for IE 6: #target_element { width: expression((document.body.clientWidth < 335)? “333px” : “auto”); min-width: 333px; } • Read more »