Compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies

Fast text replacement with canvas and VML - no Flash or images required.

The Fluid 960 Grid System templates have been built upon the work of Nathan Smith and his 960 Grid System using effects from the Mootools JavaScript library. The idea for building these templates was inspired by Andy Clarke, author of Transcending CSS, who advocates a content-out approach to rapid interactive prototyping, crediting Jason Santa Maria with the grey box method.

I have written previously on the fine art of preloading images without JavaScript using only CSS. These caching techniques have evolved in terms of effectiveness and accuracy, but may be improved further to allow for greater cross-browser functionality. In this post, I share a "CSS-only" preloading method that works better under a broader set of conditions.

The WebKit team has been developing some cutting-edge proposals to extend CSS with the ability to do declarative animations and other effects. This ability is key to maintaining the three-fold separation of HTML content, CSS presentation, and JavaScript behavior. Animation effects on the Web today are accomplished with JavaScript code which repeatedly changes an element's style at a certain interval in order to create an animated effect. This practice, however, violates the separation between presentation and behavior because the animation behaviors are directly changing the document's presentation (i.e. modifying the style property). Ideally, all of the animation triggers and presentation states would be declared in CSS. And this is exactly what the WebKit team has proposed in its CSS Transitions specification.

My friend/ex-coworker Sam the Wonder Boy used to send me late night AIM messages comprised of only three letters, "M.F.R." This would then send chills up my spine, and I'd curl up on the floor in fetal position and weep nonstop. OK, I'm exaggerating a quite bit, and Sam doesn't do that anymore. "M.F.R." stands for "Monthly Forecast Report." It was one of the many modules of a huge intranet web application we worked on years ago. As the name implies, it was a report. Before arriving to the actual report screen, the user could select some criteria such as date range, products, etc. Depending on the selection, the report can have up to sixty columns and thousands of rows. It was quite a challenge both on the backend and frontend. I initially created it using server side Excel API and dumped it to the frontend as an excel sheet. In version 2 I made it as an HTML table with the Excel export option. In version 3 I ditched HTML and went for Crystal Report, in version 3.5 it became Active Report. In version 4 we rewrote the whole application as a .NET client app, with the report section being Excel again. In version 5, well there wasn't a version 5. The whole project got outsourced to India and the team was disbanded. But that's a blog for another day.

Over the last few months, I've spent more time than I intended on exploring the whole idea of fonts and typography for the Web. (My friend, typography expert Simon Pascal Klein, writes, "The former is a stylized set of glyphs of characters," while "the other [is] the whole art of creating type and setting it into the written word." For more clarification and illumination, consult Jon Tan and Mark Simonson.) In the process, I've been considering the idea of font stacks-using the well-known font-family CSS property-to list as many different fonts as possible in order to optimize the web site experience for a maximum number of users.

The jQuery sIFR Plugin is an addon for jQuery that makes it easy to replace text in a web page with flash text (sIFR).

once upon a time some really good web developers created sIFR. Their goal was to seamlessly convert HTML headlines into nice fonts. Well, these developers did a great job getting it to work nicely. Looking at their code, I decided I would create a "lite" version of sIFR using a more object-oriented approach. sIFR Lite is a bit easier to read, and more intuitive to use. The only drawbacks are that it is currently unproven on a large scale in the real world. This library is of course open-source, so I welcome you to submit any improvements, suggestions, or bug reports using my contact form.

background-image + background-repeat + background-position + 24-bit PNGs for Internet Explorer 6 (...Better late than never!)

CSS Spriting is a technique for speeding up the load times for your website by reducing the number of HTTP requests for images to the server.

Web forms. Everybody knows web forms. Each day we have to fill in some information in a web form, be it a simple login to your webmail application, an online purchase, or signing up for a website. They are the basic, and pretty much the only way of gathering information on the web. You basically know a web form when you see one as they always look the same and they've kept this look over the years. Try as hard as you might but web forms can only change their appearance so much. Some may argue that this is a good usability feature, and I tend to agree, but there comes a time when you just need to style web forms so that they look different. How do you do that? Niceforms comes to the rescue! Niceforms is a script that will replace the most commonly used form elements with custom designed ones. You can either use the default theme that is provided or you can even develop your own look with minimal effort.

I'm a new contributor to the SitePoint blogs and will mostly be covering front-end development and Semantic Web technologies. I'm looking forward to participating in the SitePoint community! Sometimes it's the simplest things that go unnoticed for the longest time. Case in point, while catching up on some WSG reading tonight, I saw a link to Paul Hammond's Conditional classnames for Internet Explorer. In a sentence, he shows how using conditional comments to customize the element's class name can be used to simplify CSS selectors for a number of advantageous purposes.

With typeface.js you can embed custom fonts in your web pages so you don't have to render text to images.

In the previous article in this series, we covered the basic concept of progressive enhancement; now, we can begin discussing how to use it. There are many ways to integrate progressive enhancement into your work using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and this article will cover a few of the biggies and get you thinking about other ways to progressively enhance your sites.

Emastic is a CSS Framework, it's continuing mission: to explore a strange new world, to seek out new life and new web spaces, to boldly go where no CSS Framework has gone before. * Lightweight (compressed weight less then 4kb) * Personalized width of the page in (em,px,%) * Use of fixed and fluid columns in the grid. * Elastic Layout with "em"s

This is now the 3rd part of my current adventures in looking into CSS performance and how it performs in various states across various browsers.

here are many ways to approach Web typography in order to create effective and expressive results. Let's take a closer look at some principles, rules and ideas for approaching Web typography decisions - you can use them as a starting point for learning how to achieve effective type setting on the Web.