Article Archives

Harry Roberts  with a nice technique on using pseudo elements to create the body border effect without extraneous markup (same idea with extra markup gets you older browser support). Read the comments for some other good suggestions. …

One classic layout conundrum is how much stuff to put in a sidebar. Ideally the height of the main content area and the sidebar are about the same, to avoid either area having a large blank area which can be …

It’s not “spec,” but WebKit browsers support image masks. If you are familiar with Photoshop, they work like that. You declare an image to use as as mask. The black parts of that image hide what it is over, …

Nicole Sullivan on forcing elements to create new formatting contexts with display: table-cell and a string of X’s as pseudo content to force it full width. …

There are all kinds of CSS resets, from the ever-popular Meyer reset, to the newfangled HTML5 reset. Do you know what the difference between the different ones are? It’s a bit hard to picture, even when looking at and comparing …

Big thanks to Mathias Bynens for the guest post today! I’d call this a bonafide CSS trick!

A few days ago, Chris tweeted:

If we could stack pseudo elements (e.g. :after:after) we could build a whole website with …

Nate Croft and Jon Longnecker (remember Jon?) from FortySeven Media have a new video podcast they are producing called The Kick Awesome Show. CSS-Tricks was happy to sponsor Episode 13.

These guys sure look like they …

Nice little article with visual demos on the different timing functions for CSS transitions. The progress bar is neat. Also notice the scaling transform on the table of contents. Not sure I love that exact implementation but I like the …

What do you think folks? I’ll hold off on any opinions until we wrap it up. Poll is over in the sidebar.…

Peter-Paul Koch:

If mobile browsers were to implement position: fixed exactly as the desktop browsers do, many sites with fixed elements would become unusable on mobile.

… I believe it’s time for position: device-fixed.…

A section of text that fades into the nothingness. But wait, a beacon. A “read more” link shines through the darkness. Click upon it and all text is revealed! CSS3 gradients are used for the text fading and jQuery is used to handle the animated reveal.

There are many ways to skin a cat. Also, there are many ways to accomplish the same thing in CSS. The three sided border is one of those things, so we’ll look at four different examples that all do it. I would think this kind of thing is a bit confusing as a beginner, so hopefully seeing these different bits of code isolated will make it clearer.

There is a bit of an idea in our little web design world that “nobody who works on the web went to school for it.” At least, I get that feeling. Especially from little stories like these:

I have …

It’s really unavoidable these days, and that’s good because it’s awesome. Here are some choice quotes from Kenny Meyers:

Not every company is a Ruby shop. Not every company is a .NET shop. It’s my belief that 99% of the …

The illustrated backgrounds that slide by with faded edges are the best part.…

I had some extra time over Thanksgiving so I decided to spend it doing some recreational designing of this site. Here’s a few quick notes (I need to get back to content!):

• Colorful! I think bold colors are fun and

…

With all the vendor prefixes and all the new complex properties like animations and gradients, it’s nice to format them so they are nicely readable. I agree with David DeSandro here that lining up the values makes for nice lookin’ …

Twenty four great blog posts by top industry peeps in twenty four days. This year it’s going print as well.…

Maybe you’ve heard of things like Pngcrush before which supposedly does an amazing job at optimizing png files, but then when you go check it out it turns out it’s this nerdy command line tool with crappy documentation and it …

When building a menu or other list of links, it’s generally a good practice to use display: block; or display: inline-block; so that you can increase the size of the link target. The simple truth: bigger link targets are easier …

You’ve seen this before:

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js"></script>

This is a way you can load a JavaScript library like jQuery directly from Google’s CDN (Content Delivery Network). You can get quick copy/paste access to these from ScriptSrc.net.

See in that above …

If you are a designer who is used to creating gradients with Adobe Creative Suite products, you’ll likely enjoy this. It’s the same interface with the little color pointers that you slide around, click to add, drag to remove, and …

All the game logic is JavaScript (very minimal), but all the fancies are CSS3 that get triggered by the application and removal of class names. …

Ol’ Trent posted a quick tip post on using inset box-shadow for some simple yet classy effects. One of those techniques ended up with an vignette effect over top of an image. Like this:

Yeah, you could do it in …

Four techniques are explored on accomplishing a full page background image that conforms to our exceptions: no white space, scales as needed, retains aspect ratio, centered, and more.

I think the name “cross site” is confusing. It’s easy to hear that and think it involves code on one website attacking code on another website. That’s not what it is. Not to mention its unfortunate “true” acronym.

It simply …

Really neat presentation of a book by the Google Chrome Team. Everyone seems to be calling it an “HTML5″ book There is certainly a bunch of HTML5 going on, but there is also loads of CSS3 and clever JavaScript at …

At this year’s jQuery Summit I gave a mostly-totally-revised version of my talk “Solving Common Client Requests with jQuery” that I originally gave at the Bay Area jQuery Conference earlier this year.

I always think slides are a little weird …

Using hash-tag links with a fixed position header can be problematic, as the element may be hidden underneath the header as the browser will scroll until the element headbutts the top of browser viewport. There are a couple of ways we can fix this…

WebKit supports the cool background-clip CSS3 property, which you can use to do some pretty neat stuff. The first time we touched on it was the iPhone Slide-to-unlock idea where we set a gradient to animate through the background of …

What is the most appropriate possible markup for breadcrumbs? We’ll take a look at a bunch of different possibilities of various complexities and semantic success. Then also see what Google has to recommend as well as what HTML5 has in store for them.

Follow along as we use a few very simple CSS3 transitions to create a “slideup” box effect. Roll over the box with your mouse, and the title of the box slides out of the way and a more descriptive stylized …

Good news today for everyone interested in learning more about WordPress! I have a new training course available on Lynda.com: WordPress 3.0: Creating and Editing Custom Themes.

This is the most comprehensive training I have ever created, so if …

jQuery plugin from Han Lin Yap which allows you to write CSS3 without vendor prefixes. This plugin will read through your CSS files and in-document <style> blocks, find the CSS3 stuff, then append a new <style> block to your …

I had some custom Vanilla Forums work done by Trademark Productions. This is my thank you to them and how my experience went down.

This article by Robert Biggs goes into a solution for using SVG for gradients in Internet Explorer 9, because it doesn’t support CSS3 gradients. The core benefit being that the SVG image format is XML and actually rather similar in …

Did you know you can make triangles with pure CSS? It’s pretty easy. You just make a block level element with zero width and height, a colored border on one side, and transparent borders on the two adjacent sides. They …

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript got invited to a halloween party. They decided they would all dress up as each other!

HTML went as JavaScript:

<div id="pumpkin" onclick="alert('Boo!');"></div>

JavaScript went as CSS:

var jackolantern = document.getElementById('pumpkin');
jackolantern.style.color = "orange";
jackolantern.style.backgroundColor = …

Click-and-drag to rotate these complex objects through a pseudo three dimensional space. It’s a familiar design pattern, but one that is particularly difficult to pull off. No Flash, not even canvas. Just some fancy JavaScript and CSS (WebKit 3D Transforms). …

You have one dropdown menu, and depending on the user’s choice in that one, a second dropdown gets filled with choices. Let’s cover three different ways you can go about that.

View Demo   Download Files

The Markup

For our …

Marc Grabanski brought up and interesting idea on Twitter yesterday.

Commas before or after the line on json objects and multi var definitions?

Here are examples of object literals:

// commas before
var vampyre = {
teeth: 'sharp'
, blood: …

Originally published on July 21, 2008 as only a jQuery technique. Now updated to include CSS3 and a combo technique which is mo’ betta.

A garage door style menu is where an image (the “door”) slides up to reveal something …

Let’s be clear here, just in case someone is finding this from a search engine: there are no parent selectors in CSS, not even in CSS3. It is an interesting topic to talk about though, and some fresh talk …

Framework by Nathan Smith for nice looking, HTML5 ready, progressively enhanced, cross-browser forms.…

Equal height columns have been a need of web designers forever. If all the columns share the same background, equal height is irrelevant because you can set that background on a parent element. But if one or more columns need …

Remy Sharp’s cool site for HTML5 demos has a “View Source” button on each of the individual demo pages. Click it, and you see the entire source code for the page you are looking at. It’s not a popup or …

The full question is:

If you have a degree from college and have a job, is that degree related to your current job?

It’s pretty common to hear about folks who have made their way into the web worker world …

A collection of media queries from Andy Clarke to get you started building responsive sites. Responsive is the new word for sites that react to the space they have available to restyle their content the best they can in that …

Version three of my book, co-authored by Jeff Starr, has been revised from cover to cover ensuring everything is up to date and featuring a new chapter on WordPress 3. Now the print version is back in limited quantity sporting …

The question was:

Do you ever use two JavaScript libraries on the same page?

My thinking in creating this poll was around two ideas:

1. An excuse to educate people that using multiple libraries on the same page is generally a

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