CSS

A talk that I gave at the Developer, Developer, Developer day in Reading in 2011 about my experiences trying to make CSS easier to maintain. Contains slides and sample downloads.

Firefox 3.6 supports multiple background images so I thought it was time to give them a go and figure out how they work. May contain small rant about beautiful markup.

A small browser quirk for IE6 where absolute positioning with the CSS right property is one pixel out when the parent container has an odd number of pixels.

How to use a tool called Packer.NET to build javascript minification into a MSBuild script.

I don’t much like reset stylesheets. They make extra work when creating CSS and are an extra request for the browser to make to build a page.

Experimenting with using an SVG image as a CSS background image.

Inline-block is a halfway point between setting an element’s display to inline or to block. It keeps the element in the inline flow of the document like display:inline does, but you can manipulate the element’s box attributes (width, height and vertical margins) like you can with display:block.

My find for today was a Firefox extension called Dust-Me Selectors from the SitePoint guys that scans a web site looking for unused selectors in the CSS. It extracts the style references for the current page and then looks at the page to see where they are used. It can look at the current page [...]

CSS3 is going to include a new attribute called box-sizing so we can choose whether the width set on an element will include borders and padding or whether borders and paddings will be added to the width. The difference is basically the difference between the IE5 and W3C box models. The default will still be [...]

Use negative margins and light weight semantic markup to display a form with the labels on one side and form elements on the other. No tables or divs needed at all. Works in all browsers. Noone who wasn’t a web developer would believe what a pain it is finding a good solution to this little problem.

Media queries are extra params for the CSS @media types that you can use to target styles for different devices based the device’s capabilities like dimensions and colour depth. They are part of the W3C CSS3 standard and are supported in the latest vesion of Opera (desktop and mini versions), Firefox and Safari. Media queries [...]

I was trying to style a bit of html without having to add a new class into the markup and came across two types of CSS selectors that I haven’t used before called child and sibling selectors. You can use child selectors to target the direct children of an element. The syntax is parent > [...]

I just wanted to bookmark a really useful page about how to make block elements in CSS expand to contain floated elements. There are a couple of suggested ways to deal with this on the page but the one I needed today was adding an element to the end of the float that has the [...]

Yay! I’m so happy because I just read a post on the IE blog that says IE7 is going to support attribute selectors! In fact it says that IE7 is going to aim to be CSS 2.1 compliant! They’re also *finally* fixing the problems with rendering transparent png files. I was a bit cynical when [...]

I saw an article on WASP today asking for comment from web developers on the CSS 3 standard that they’re currently working on. It’s kind of hard to tell how it’s going to be without trying to make a webpage with it, but the idea of being able to use multiple background images in the [...]

Because of incompatibilities between IE and the world, to get PNG transparency to work in IE you need to add this to your stylesheet: img.transparent { filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src=’myimage.png’,sizingMethod=’scale’);} There’s more information at A List Apart and WebFX

It’s funny the way the universe echos sometimes. While I was walking to lunch yesterday I was thinking that it was high time developers got more choice about the fonts that their webpages display in. I mean we live in an age where bandwidth restrictions have relaxed so much there’s video linked from the homepage [...]