Cross-browser compatibility is one of the most time consuming tasks for any web designer. We've seen many different articles over the net describing common problems and fixes. I've collated all the information I could find to create some coding conventions for ensuring that your site will work first time in every browser. There are some things you should consider for Safari and Firefox also, and IE isn't always the culprit for your CSS woes.

There are two popular approaches to positioning with CSS: float and absolute positioning. Both approaches have their pros and cons. My teammates and I have developed a new positioning approach that gives us the best of both worlds. After quite a bit of experimenting and testing, it's time to share the technique with the rest of the world and see how we can work together to improve it. I'm calling it "faux absolute positioning" after the faux columns technique that simulates the presence of a column.

examples of css styleswitchers

HTML email newsletters have come a long way in the five years since this article was first published. HTML email is still a very successful communications medium for both publishers and readers. Publishers can track rates for email opens, forwards, and clickthroughs, and thereby can measure reader interest in products and topics; readers are presented with information that's laid out like a web page, in a way that's more visually appealing, and much easier to scan and navigate, than plain text email.

Browser idiosyncracies, spam registers, and various mail clients are just some of the pitfalls that must be faced by email marketers. Make sure your HTML email gets through with Tim's essential how-to.

Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit version 1.0 is available for OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), Adobe Illustrator (PDF and SVG), and Adobe Photoshop (PNG), and covers the following topics: * Ad Units * Calendars * Carousels * Charts and Tables * UI Controls * Form Elements * Grids * Menus and Buttons * Mobile - General * Mobile - iPhone * Navigation and Pagination * OS Elements * Placeholder Text * Screen Resolutions * Tabs * Windows and Containers

As web designers, we've grown pretty good at understanding how to create a modern, semantic, accessible website using XHTML and CSS. We understand what makes a good website, and how to make it happen. When it comes time to design emails though, do all the same rules apply? Are there things we should be doing specifically for email that don't make sense on a website? In this article we'll discuss the technical, design and information elements that make up a successful HTML email.

Did you like my previous CSS tutorial on how to create gradient text effects? I'm using the same trick to show you how to decorate your images and photo galleries without editing the source images. The trick is very simple. All you need is an extra tag and apply a background image to create the overlaying effect. It is very easy and flexible - see my demos with over 20 styles, from a simple image icon to a rounded corner to a masked layer (both decorative and complex).

Very nice collection of screenshots about all different kinds of design patterns.

When it comes to planning the layout of your new website there are just three commonly used website layout structures to choose from: Fixed; Fluid & Elastic width layouts. None of these are perfect; each comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.

This tutorial will be taking a look at some of the new ways you can manipulate user interface features in CSS3. But what do we mean by "user interface"? CSS3 brings some great new properties relating to resizing elements, cursors, outlining, box layout and more. We're focusing on three of the most significant user interface enhancements in this tutorial. The examples shown below can be seen at our CSS3 examples page. Many, however, can only be appreciated in the latest builds of various browsers:

So, you know how to use a graphic for your submit button, right? Well, have you ever had trouble getting that graphical submit button to line-up with your text field when both are side-by-side on the same horizontal line?

CSS has brought us many capabilities in terms of typography and the web, but we always seem to be limited to the same 4-5 typefaces over and over again. There is an inherant problem, if the font you specify isn't on the viewers computer it won't render in that font. So as designers and developers we end up selecting the ones that we can safely assume is available on most computers today. So most pages use Arial, Helvetica, or Georgia as their typefaces… and the world of the web remains slightly more bland.

Here is a LIVE demo showing how input buttons are rendered in your browser. The 'Standard' column will look different depending on your operating system. The '+ Border' column shows the same buttons with a red border added. (This removes the default button style as seen in the first column.)

This must be the easiest way to get full support for PNG-transparency in Internet Explorer 6. The technique even works for PNG-transparency in CSS backgrounds. Credit goes to Angus Turnbull for creating this workaround. My hat is thoroughly tipped.

esterday's post showed how to hack the :first-child pseudo-class into IE6 with jQuery and CSS. Continuing with that theme, today and tomorrow we'll show how to enable transparent PNG support in IE6

With each new release of Windows Internet Explorer, support for the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard has steadily improved. Internet Explorer 6 was the first fully CSS Level 1-compliant version of Internet Explorer. Windows Internet Explorer 8 is planned to be a fully CSS Level 2.1-compliant browser, and will support some features of CSS 3. If the browsers your Web site is targeting include earlier versions of Internet Explorer, however, you want to know the level of CSS compliance for those as well. This article provides an at-a-glance look at CSS compliance across recent versions of Internet Explorer, including support in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers and planned support in the final version of Internet Explorer 8.

For many, designing and coding for emails can become a frustrating task. With so many different types of email clients that each seem to follow distinct standards, many hours can be spent just to figure out what works. Luckily, there are great resources available for reference.

Enforcing a minimum height for block elements in HTML is one of those few CSS tricks that you can't live without. There are still enough folks using IE6, unfortunately, and it doesn't support the min-height or min-width CSS parameters. This has caused the invention of a number of different hacks and browser-conditional style sheets to get the desired effect.