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CSS Bloom is a website showcasing the best CSS based designs used by Blog's and Online Portfolio's. By providing links, and previews of the best designs, we aim to provide our viewers with inspiration for their websites. If you have come across a design which is missing from CSS Bloom, but you feel should be added, or if you would like to submit your own design, then please use the Submit link at the top of the page. PetrSimi January 26th, 2007 (11 votes, average: 3.09 out of 5)  Loading ... Comments (0) | Permalink Blog PetrSimi January 26th, 2007 (11 votes, average: 3 out of 5)  Loading ... Comments (0) | Permalink CreativeBits January 26th, 2007

How should a CSS framework be built? There are several possible ways to go about building a framework, but the most common and arguably the most useful is to abstract your common CSS into individual stylesheets that each cover a particular part of the whole. For example, you may have a stylesheet that sets up the typography and another that handles the mass reset. The beauty of the approach is the ability to selectively include only the styles that you need. You may end up with six or seven different stylesheets in your framework, but if a particular project doesn’t need one or two of them, they don’t have to be included. The framework we created in our office has five stylesheets: reset.css—handles the mass reset. type.css—handles the typography. grid.css—handles the layout grid. widgets.css—handles widgets like tabs, drop-down menus, and “read more” buttons. base.css—includes all the other stylesheets, so that we only need to call base.css from our (X)HTML documents to use the entire framework.

A word of caution This method works quite well, but there is a valid concern to be raised: it adds to the number of HTTP connections needed to render each page. On large, high-traffic sites, adding five more HTTP connections to every page view may result in angry system administrators. Two possible solutions to this are: Include everything in a single file, rather than breaking it into modules. The problem here is that you lose the ability to include only certain parts of the framework, and you also make maintenance more difficult. Have a server-side process that dynamically flattens the individual files into a single response. I’ve not seen this done, but it could be very efficient if done well. Using my example framework above, this dynamic process could occur when base.css is requested, but not when type.css, grids.css, etc. are. This way, the individual components are still available, but the entire framework is available in a flattened version, as well.

Grids & Typography Typogridphy is a CSS framework constructed to allow web designers and front-end developers to quickly code typograhically pleasing grid layouts. Based on the popular 960 Grid System, Typogridphy allows you to create grid layouts which are versatile and great looking. Typogridphy is made of fully validate, semantic and strict xHTML, and validate CSS.

TabCreatr.com is an application that allows you to create your own tabs and Css menus.

13 Awesome Javascript CSS Menus Posted in: Ajax, Javascript, CSS 31 Comments, Add a Response

There are many tutorials out there on how to create your own image gallery. There are simple ones made from pure CSS, and there are complex ones using css and javascript. By the end of this article you will have the information necessary to start building your own photo gallery. The first tutorial is from cssplay and is one of my favorites around. They have a very elegant and simple image gallery. Your images are separated into different sections (people, plants, animals, etc) and all your images for each section listed nicely underneath. As you hover over each image it expands double it's size so you can take a better look at each image before you view the full version. The interface is very clean and simple to use, I recommend taking a look at this one.

Name classes/IDs based on function, not appearance. If you create a .smallblue class, and later get a request to change the text to large and red, the class stops making any form of sense. Instead use descriptive classes like .copyright and .pullquote.

When in doubt, validate.

When relying on floats for layouts, make sure they clear properly.

In November 2005 I presented on pro.html.it a three-part article on creating CSS layouts using techniques like negative margins, any order columns and in some case opposite floats. The main goal of the article was getting the maximum number of layouts based on the same markup, each with valid CSS and HTML, without hacks nor workaround and a good cross-browser compatibility. The result is a set of 40 layouts that we've thought worth sharing: on each of them you'll find also a download link (if you want, you can download the entire collection, 40 HTML pages in a single zip file). Further details can be found below the gallery.