CSS Evangelist

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.

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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.

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120 Excellent Examples of CSS Horizantal Menu

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).

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