Posts in the CSS category

• Clearing floats with the overflow property

  18 June 2009 by Clive Walker

  Using the float property is a fundamental part of the tools that we use as web designers/developers when wrangling with CSS. Floating an image is probably one of the most common tasks when we want to align the image either left or right within a containing block [div or paragraph]. However, use of the float property comes with its own problems and chief amongst these is that often we need to ‘clear the float’ so that other elements [often the element that contains the floated element] behave in the way that we want. Here’s a method I have used recently.

  3 Comments

• Learning more about CSS

  29 May 2009 by Clive Walker

  Articles about unfamiliar or new CSS techniques are great for expanding your CSS knowledge and there’s always the chance that you will need to use the methods in a client’s project. Here are a couple of CSS methods that I saw recently. Why not try one of these or something else new in your website projects?

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• Universal style sheet for Internet Explorer 6

  22 May 2009 by Clive Walker

  Andy Clarke has written an interesting blog post called Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS where he advocates the use of a stripped down style sheet [similar to a print style sheet in some ways] that is directed at IE6 users.

• Web typography and font stacks

  21 May 2009 by Clive Walker

  I have been reading more about typography on the web since I went to Skillswap Goes Typographic earlier this year. Richard Rutter has put together a good summary of the event and the slides from his and Jon Tan‘s presentations are well worth reading. Despite some advances with web fonts or font embedding and other methods for displaying and using different fonts in websites, many web designers and front-end developers stick with a core set of fonts and specify these using a font stack in their website style sheets.

• Looking at grids for layout

  05 May 2009 by Clive Walker

  Over the last few days, I have been reading up in more detail on the use of grids for website layout. Using a grid does not mean that your design will look ‘all boxy’ [for example, you can still have curved corner shaped elements] but means that the layout elements on your page are placed according to an accurately measured grid.

• Table layouts compared with CSS layouts

  15 April 2009 by Clive Walker

  There's a good article over at Smashing Magazine called Table Layouts vs. Div Layouts: From Hell to… Hell? which discusses the pros and cons of different website layout methods.

• Vertical centering with CSS

  08 March 2009 by Clive Walker

  Aligning an element so that is is vertically centered should be something that is quite easy but CSS makes it more difficult than it should be!

• Flexible Web Design by Zoe Mickley Gillenwater

  04 March 2009 by Clive Walker

  I know that I usually create fixed width website layouts with CSS and it's relatively recently that I started experimenting a bit with liquid and elastic layouts.

  4 Comments

• HTML, CSS and Web Standards. What more could you want?!

  08 February 2009 by Clive Walker

  Whilst searching Amazon for books about CSS [as you do], I came across HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach by Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson. I must admit I have not seen this book before and it looks like one that I should have in my collection.

  The book is from Friends of Ed who normally publish very good web design and development books. I have a few other books from Friends of Ed and they are well worth it.

• Add a query string to your style sheet link for cache busting

  21 January 2009 by Clive Walker

  I was looking at the UX London website recently and I noticed that their CSS files are referenced with a query string like this.

  2 Comments