Article Archives

→ CSSOff Kickoff on Oct. 20th! The PSD for the CSSOff is going to drop on October 20, 2011. You’ll have exactly 2 weeks (until November 3) to code up and submit your final conversion. Follow the title link to the official page where you can …	September 7, 2011
Yay! CSS-Tricks Shirts! I know what you were just thinking. You were thinking, man, I love CSS-Tricks so much but nothing in my wardrobe helps me publicly display that. Right‽ Fret not. Now you can get your hands on one of these bad …	September 7, 2011	60 comments
→ FitVids.js Super lightweight jQuery plugin to make all videos fluid width, while maintaining their original aspect ratio. Explanation, video, and discussion on Dave’s site.…	September 6, 2011
→ Why Browsers Read Selectors Right to Left When I first learned that browsers read CSS selectors from right to left it felt kinda weird and confusing. Boris Zbarsky explains why it’s done that way in a way that makes perfect sense. Part of the reason: …most of …	September 5, 2011
→ steps() Lea Verou makes a “typing” animation with the CSS3 sub-property `steps` which allows you to specify how many keyframes an animation uses. Knowing the number of keyframes means you can know exactly that the CSS will be like at that …	September 5, 2011
Tabs with Round Out Borders A technique for a rounded tabs where the top corners are rounded, but also the bottom corners are rounded where they attach to the content area. “Round out” or “flared” borders, if you will.	September 4, 2011	53 comments
→ Adaptive Images Project from Matt Wilcox for serving the right images to the right devices (i.e. small images to small browser windows, large images to large browser windows). Small browser windows, regardless of bandwidth considerations, shouldn’t get a giant image scaled down …	August 31, 2011
Fold Out Popups A rich HTML popup content area that works when you click a link/button (rather than hover like tooltips work). This uses a bunch of CSS3 and the functionality is also handled purely with CSS, although we discuss that at the end.	August 31, 2011	49 comments
→ AnythingZoomer Plugin My AnythingZoomer jQuery demo has been plugin-ized by Mottie (who also maintains the AnythingSlider). It has some new features and is easier to work with by nature of being a plugin. …	August 30, 2011
→ SitePoint Podcast #127 Listen to Louis Simoneau and I yak about CSS. …	August 27, 2011
Sideways Headers Christian Heilmann had an interesting CSS predicament the other day. The idea was to make header tags rotated 90-degrees and align along the left of a blog of content rather than at the top. So, like this. Easy, right? Should …	August 26, 2011	54 comments
Pop From Top Notification Have you seen that design pattern where a notification pops down from the top of the browser window, then slides away? We can rock that in pure CSS. View Demo Download Files We’ll just make a div: `<div id="note"> …`	August 25, 2011	47 comments
When (and when not to) use an anchor tag? Question from a reader on when using the anchor tag is the right choice and when it’s possibly OK to use another element for behavioral stuff.	August 24, 2011	44 comments
Functional CSS Tabs Revisited Functional tabbed area with just CSS. The backstory, where we are now, and the awesome theoretical future.	August 23, 2011	49 comments
→ Bootstrap HTML/CSS framework from Twitter (Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton). Pretty comprehensive: nice clean design and typography, grid system (fluid or fixed), form elements, buttons/navigation, alerts, tooltips, LESS support… I think a web app startup could do a lot worse than …	August 22, 2011
→ Don’t Fear the Internet Incredibly well done set of introduction to web design tutorial videos by Jessica Hische & Russ Maschmeyer. Kinda like my The VERY Basics video, but far more professional. Will be recommending this to every single person asking me how …	August 22, 2011
→ Deck.js Pretty sweet slide deck framework that works in the browser by Caleb Troughton. This is damn impressive too. …	August 22, 2011
Launch of Deals for Designers There’s a new area of the site: Deals for Designers with discounts on products and services from quality companies.	August 22, 2011	13 comments
→ Brushed Metal with CSS Gradients By the inimitable simurai. Another use case for the don’t-exist-yet but-will-soon “conical” gradients.…	August 21, 2011
Infinite All-CSS Scrolling Slideshow Just for kicks I wanted to see if I could make a row of images animate across a page and repeat indefinitely. Turns out it’s really not that hard. The way I did it was to make one big long …	August 21, 2011	39 comments
How I Think Posting HTML In Comments Should Work People post a good bit of HTML in the comments of articles on this site. They are trying to demonstrate something, ask for troubleshooting help, show alternate techniques, etc. This is excellent. I want to encourage this as much as …	August 19, 2011	37 comments
A Really Nice Way To Handle Popup Information Showing additional info (“popup”) when hovering over an element is a pretty easy thing to do. But there is a ton of subtle ways to improve that interaction. This articles goes over a really excellent technique for this covered by Doug Neiner at the Front End Design Conference 2011.	August 17, 2011	26 comments
→ Blogging. You can do better. That’s my (solo) panel name for SXSW Interactive 2011. I’ll love you forever if you upvote it to increase my chances of getting to do it this year. It was denied city last year. I haven’t talked much about blogging …	August 17, 2011
→ #100 I finally shot the 100th video. No big fireworks, just more front end learnin’! In this one we look at a Photoshop design and mark it up in HTML5 as semantically as we can.…	August 17, 2011
→ Skin your Chrome Inspector Darcy Clarke on how you can give the Web Inspector in Chrome a facelift (with example stylesheet). …	August 16, 2011
Transitions and Animations on CSS Generated Content Generated content means pseudo elements added to the page via the `::before` and `::after`. The support for applying transitions or animations to these in the current browser landscape is not great. I think this is a huge bummer, so …	August 16, 2011	25 comments
→ Flip flop navigation with box-flex Jeremy Keith shows us how to put the navigation on the bottom of the page in a vertical layout for small screens and the top of the page in a horizontal layout for large screens by fiddling with the the …	August 15, 2011
→ ‘space’ and ’round’ values Louis Lazaris shows us how `space` and `round` give us some more possibilities with how repeating backgrounds are dealt with in CSS3.…	August 15, 2011
Persistent Headers This is some code to get the header of some content area to stay visible at the top of the screen as you scroll through that content. Then go away when you’ve scrolled past that relevant section. Header… persisting. Couple …	August 14, 2011	47 comments
Design v9 Fun fun fun, the new site design is live!	August 10, 2011	0 comments
→ The details and summary elements Tom Leadbetter from HTML5 doctor shows us all about the summary and details element. I think this will be a particularly useful pair of elements, especially as browser support grows, with its baked in hide/show functionality.…	August 9, 2011
→ Making Video Fluid Width Me: In a world of responsive and fluid layouts on the web one media type stands in the way of perfect harmony: video. I wrote an article for Net Magazine where I tackle making video (from any source) work in …	August 9, 2011
Indeterminate Checkboxes While checkboxes can only either submit their value (checked state) or not (unchecked state), they have a third visual-only state: indeterminate. This is only settable via JavaScript and does not affect the value, only the appearance. We’ll cover how it works and a simple use case.	August 8, 2011	44 comments
New Poll: Site Title Structure The new poll is up in the sidebar of the site. This time it’s about the structure of page titles. Literally, the `<title>` tag in the head of a site that gives the browser window/tab its title. I’m just asking …	August 5, 2011	49 comments
→ Prefixr Jeffrey Way has created an app which looks through your CSS and adds all the missing CSS3 vendor prefixes. It’s smart enough to do it right no matter which ones you’ve added or forgotten. Cooler, it has an API which …	August 4, 2011
What Makes For a Semantic Class Name? Semantics in HTML is always a hot topic. Some people strive for it at all times. Some people critisize a dogmatic adherence to it. Some people don’t know what the heck it is. I’d describe semantics as it relates to …	August 4, 2011	109 comments
→ The Future of CSS Layouts Peter Gasston shows us: columns, flexbox, grid, template, positioned floats, exclusions, and regions. This stuff is going to be a big deal in a couple of years and it will be very interesting to see which of these get popular …	August 3, 2011
Poll Results: Large file on major CDN or small file local I quite enjoyed this poll because the results were so neck and neck. It was only in the last week or so that a clear winner has emerged. Like all polls ever run in the history of this website, there …	July 31, 2011	17 comments
Seriously, Just Make a JSFiddle Has anyone ever asked you for help troubleshooting some combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and they copy and paste the entirety of all the files into an email or forum post? It’s super common, and so consider this an …	July 28, 2011	63 comments
→ Chosen Super hot jQuery and Prototype plugin by the Harvest team that seriously improves the UI of `<select>` elements. …	July 27, 2011
Examples of Sites where localStorage should or is being used localStorage is a new JavaScript API in HTML5 that allows us to save data in key/value pairs in a user’s browser. It’s a little bit like cookies except: Cookies expire and get cleared a lot, localStorage is forever (until …	July 27, 2011	32 comments
→ CSSFrag Shaun Inman with a Safari extension (and Firefox port) that impliments the (not real) fragment identifiers proposal. Essentially: same-page document links that don’t need the ID/hash-tag thing. Alternatively, you target with a CSS selector: `http://example.com/lorem.html#css(.content:nth-child(2))`…	July 25, 2011
→ 3D Cube with One Element Pseudo elements make the two other sides needed (you can only see three sides of a cube at once). I Love the idea of making shapes without loads of extra divs (obviously) and extra love the idea of …	July 25, 2011
Seamless Responsive Photo Grid Let’s say you have a bunch of images you want to display, and the goal is to get them edge-to-edge on the browser window with no gaps. Just because you think that would be cool. They are of all different …	July 24, 2011	49 comments
→ Web IQ Quiz Pretty fun, well designed, interesting quiz. You gotta cough up an email and stuff to play any of the quizzes beyond the first one so you might get some random Windows Phone emails or something, but hey it’s fun.…	July 20, 2011
→ Classy Text Shadows Tim Brown from Typekit shares some pretty classy CSS text shadows and drops some painter’s terminology. The Typekit blog exemplifies an idea I’ve been telling any company I’ve been involved with for years and years. Publish lots of interesting articles …	July 19, 2011
→ Everything About Radial Gradients John Allsopp with a comprehensive article and updated tool for creating them. Funny how the vast majority of radial gradient examples are super in-your-face eye-seizure colors. I think it’s because the “real world” uses for them are few. Subtle lighting …	July 19, 2011
Little CSS Stuff Newcomers Get Confused About Nobody was born understanding CSS. We all struggled our way through the confusion. Good times, good times. Let’s think back on those confusing moments, that are probably confusing people as we speak. I’ll list some that I remember and you list yours.	July 18, 2011	117 comments
Convert a Menu to a Dropdown for Small Screens Create a menu that, on smaller screens, changes into a dropdown menu. A dropdown takes up much less screen real estate and can be easier to use. This tutorial shows you how and discusses the ups and downs.	July 15, 2011	52 comments
→ Identity at Mozilla New project from Mozilla team to tackle the long-standing issue of single-signon (not needing a unique login/pass for every single app in the world). I love it when apps have “Sign in with Twitter”, but I’m not sure Twitter should …	July 15, 2011