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CopyrightYou may use this method on your personal 'non-profit' web site without seeking my permission. A link back to CSSplay is always appreciated.Commercial usage is also permitted without seeking approval, but I would ask that a donation is considered to support my work on CSSPlay. If you are having problems integrating any of my demonstrations into your website then I now offer a service to fault find and correct any errors that you may have introduced. Please email me for more information.

Most Useful 50 CSS Tips And Tools For Webmasters

In this laboratory I perform various experiments in the realms of digital magick. Here I work with images, and 3D virtual spaces, as well as more traditional geometrical models to try and understand the graphical aspects of Computional Sorcery

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.

Example

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the W3C, has said it best: “Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”

Methodologies including layered development via progressive enhancement, Unobtrusive Javascript, and Hijax ensure that higher layers don’t disrupt lower layers. However, representative testing of the core experience is critical. If you choose to adopt a Graded Browser support regime for your own web applications, be sure your site’s core content and functionality is accessible without images, CSS, and JS. Ensure that the keyboard is adequate for task completion and that when your site is accessed by a C-grade browser all advanced functionality prompts are hidden.

Free design templates don’t have to be unattractive, inaccurate and boring. Some web-sites offer high quality templates for the best price you would ever get - for free. You can download Flash-based templates as well as CSS-based layouts absolutely free; furthermore, you can use them for your personal and commercial projects without any restrictions whatsoever. Still, before using some of the templates, throw a glance at the license agreements - they’re changing all the time.

Honing in on browser incompatibility issues in Web development, Adobe Systems on Thursday is announcing CSS Advisor, a Web site that documents these problems and offers solutions.

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There’s a lot of really cool things that can be done using CSS and I’ve found some of the following resources to be very helpful to inspire ideas and learn new techniques. There’s a lot of good CSS tutorials out there so it’s pretty hard to narrow it down to only the 10 best. So instead of taking this list as the top 10 consider it as a collection of 10 great tutorials. I recommend having a good working knowledge of CSS/HTML before trying any of these on your own site.