Recent CSS reading and some advanced CSS techniques

I have been following the For a Beautiful Web blog for the last few weeks. For a Beautiful Web is a promo for Andy Clarke and his web design and development training courses [CSS included] and the blog has highlighted some new [in terms of usage] CSS techniques in two articles that I found really interesting.

In Are CSS Tables ready for prime time?, there is a discussion about the use of CSS Tables. Actually, 'CSS Tables' is a bit of a misnomer in my opinion because this method uses the CSS display property to style elements so that they display and behave like a table whereas some people seem to have assumed that 'CSS Tables' means that all the old table layout HTML that we know and love would be making a comeback. No! That aside, this is a great article that highlights the use of display:table properties for web page layout.

Secondly, in Is CSS3 RGBa ready to rock?, Andy's screencast describes the use of RGBa Transparency, which is a CSS3 module, and its application in a new, beautifully designed and styled, website that Andy is designing for a client. RGBa Transparency allows you to specific transparency values for a particular color and style an element accordingly. I think this will become a much used technique if browser support increases.

Note: Browser support for display:table is more widespread than support for RGBa transparency. IE8 and other modern browsers will support display:table but RGBa is only supported by Safari 3 and Firefox 3 beta. I'm not aware that IE8 will support it [correct me if I am wrong, please….]