Article Archives

…is now up on Smashing Magazine. I answer questions about equidistant spacing on elements, CSS image/font replacement, “max sides” on images, and a bunch of “quickfire questions”.…

Devthought had a little CSS tip the other day that is definitely worth repeating. It’s not new, it’s just an important little trick to know.

And here it is:

img { -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; }

If you use width or …

I received a question the other day from someone who was curious how I handle multiple different page styles and layouts across one site with CSS. It’s a very common scenario I think. For example, you have a homepage that …

…and you think it’s a bad idea

You think it’s a bad business move on their part. It’s going to cost them a lot of money and you don’t think it has a snowballs chance in hell of making any …

It’s a fact of CSS life that the ‘border’ of any block level element gets factored into it’s final box size for layout. That means that if you add a border on a hover to an element that didn’t already …

Tabbed areas are lovely, but when you start getting to more than 3 or 4 different tabs, they start to get a little crowded and it makes sense to provide alternative navigation of them. I think it makes sense to …

For the last two book giveaways I did, I promised I would pick a winner totally at random from the comments. There were hundreds of comments, so I wasn’t about to write the numbers on little bits of paper and …

Congratulations to itaniumdesign, the randomly selected winner of the Joomla! Template Design book contest. These last few book giveaways have been fun. Next time I do it I’ll try to get more stuff to give away so everyone has …

Links of Interest aren’t “back”, but I have some cool ones I really wanted to share, I’ll probably do this from time to time, but just not on a planned schedule like they were.

LyricSift

Richard had a neat little …

Remote Linking is what I call it when a single anchor link has multiple clickable areas in different locations. It can be used for pretty neat effects and requires nothing but CSS.

It’s not a brand new idea and in …

So we have Forums here on CSS-Tricks which are a lovely place to get and give help about web design. Now that I’ve posted almost 500 posts there, I think I have a pretty good feel for what kind of …

There are lots of dropdown menus already out there. I’m not really trying to reinvent the wheel here, but I wanted to try to do something slightly different by making them as dead simple as possible. Very stripped down code …

I get asked from time to time to do more stuff about Joomla. Joomla just happens to be one of those things I know very little about. I’ve never worked with it and I haven’t run across the need …

DISCLAIMER: I don’t “really” know anything about SEO. What I do know is the folks at Google and other big search engines are just human beings like us who have created and constantly tweak the search algorithms. Their goal is …

I didn’t get anything prepared for today, but my latest installment of “Ask Smashing Magazine” just went out, and it’s full of good stuff!

• Same-page smooth scrolling links
• Dynamic Width List Images
• DIVs of Equal Height
• Aggregating RSS

…

UPDATE: Script & Style is closed. David and I just moved on to other things.
The New:

The Old:

(I forgot to take a screenshot before I changed it! So, this is the old Photoshop document)…

More Reason to Visit

Eric Meyer said today in “Wanted: Layout System“:

Turning a bunch of divs or list items or whatever into table-role boxes is no better than just using table markup in the first place, and it’s arguably worse. Using …

The full questions is:

If CSS2 and CSS3 was fully supported in all browsers tomorrow, what would you be MOST excited about?

It’s so tough to decide, since we want it all and we want it now! RSS readers will …

We’ve been down the jQuery “sliders” path a few times before. Once for the Auto-Playing Featured Content Slider and again for the Start/Stop slider.

Many of the concepts presented in those tutorials are the same with this slider, so …

How about that for a cool animated GIF chart graphic eh? I’ll have to post how I got that to work sometime.

Well the results are in and it’s a landslide. Over 50% of you said “I don’t use CSS …

I have an article in the March 2009 (Issue #186) issue of .net magazine, sold as Practical Web Design in the United States. It is actually a two-part article and this is just part one. In this first part, I …

I recently received an email from Ben Sima who had a few questions for me:

I’m a high school junior preparing to go to an art school and study graphic design, and I would like to know about your experiences …

Visit Site

Applications

• For the Mac, there is a menu bar application (created with Fluid.app, idea and special layout thanks to Jay Salvat).
• For Windows, there is a small application as well, that minimizes to your System Tray

…

I probably won’t announce it every single time here anymore, but I am doing a regular column of Question & Answer over on Smashing Magazine now. The second installment is up, where I answer questions about list bullet colors, rollover …

This guest article has been written by Marco Kuiper, just another creative design geek that loves xHTML, CSS and jQuery. Marcos home blog can be found on Marcofolio.net.

Last week, I wrote an article on how to create …

Check out Abe up there hanging out. Abe is pretty stoked about the new Premium Service over on Are My Sites Up, and I am too. I really think any serious freelancer or web design agency should have at least …

And here is why:

It is against the spirit of web standards

The whole reason that web standards exist is so that we don’t have to write specific code for specific environments. We should write code that adheres to established …

In my little Quotes on Design project, some of the quotes are longer than others. I thought it might be kind of nifty to beef up the font-size on the shorter quotes and trim down the size for the longer …

Congratulations to: Witti, Robhert, Daniel Groves, Noclegi, and Hunter Satterwhite. You are all the winners of a FREE SSL Certificate from SSLmatic.

Thanks to everyone who entered. They’ll be more free stuff soon.…

I wrote up an article for Smashing Magazine on creating a colorful sitemap with jQuery. It covers all kinds of things, like semantic markup, enhancing with CSS3, building a quick jQuery plugin to avoid repetitive code, and more. Links …

…and the winner of the Learning jQuery book giveaway is:

Nick from Crealities. I’ll be in touch, Nick, to get your mailing address. Thanks to everyone who commented to win. Next time I’ll try and get more stuff so …

Over at Are My Sites Up we have a blog to keep users updated with new features, current issues and stuff like that. If, god forbid, the site were to go down, that blog wouldn’t do us a heck of …

This demo and article was originally created by Jay Salvat and can be seen here in French. Thanks Jay!
The Plan

• Record the X and Y coordinates of the mouse cursor when it is clicked on a web page.

…

If any of you have built an eCommerce site for a client, you have probably dealt with buying and installing an SSL certificate for the site. While this isn’t required, it’s kind of stupid not to. I sure as heck …

A few weeks ago I started a little new section of the site for books that I recommend on design and development. I’m calling it the CSS-Tricks bookshelf.

I own and have read (probably more than once) and fully …

At work we are developing a site for a client using the Magento eCommerce software. This is my first time using it and I’m finding it fairly badass (and it’s free!). There is a lot to like about it, which …

I think the problem is fairly obvious here. If you set a static width on the <select> element and the width of the text in the <option> are wider than that, the text gets cut off in IE 6-8. There …

I keep hesitating to call it an “API”, because I’m pretty sure this isn’t quite what “API” has come to mean. But, it is programming that interfaces with an application, so whatever. Last week I introduced the bit of JavaScript …

There is a much newer and nicer version of the Quotes on Design API now, check out the code over at the dedicated API page.

David Walsh helped me whip together an “api” for Quotes on Design. If …

This is not a “framework” or anything, I was just screwing around with typography and getting things to line up according to a strict horizontal and vertical grid. It is inspired by the Compose to a Vertical Rhythm article by …

I’ve done 62 Tuesday “Links of Interest” posts over the past 18 months or so. it’s been fun and a good way to share links, but I’m letting you know this will be the last one. It’s not because I …

The Magic of PHP + MySQL

It’s safe to say that nearly every website that’s up-to-date these days is using some form of content management system (CMS). While there are a ton of great free options that provide us with …

Hey folks! Me and Richard have just launched a new site I think many of you will find useful. It’s called Are My Sites Up? – I bet you can guess what it does =)

Monitor ALL your sites

The …

Happy New Years Eve everyone! Just taking the opportunity to say thanks to everyone (again) for visiting and being a part of CSS-Tricks. This site has came a long way in one short year, and now is a great time …

Creative Advent Series…

…was pretty cool on Positive Space this year. Twenty-four creatives share their best career advice.

Merb and Rails Merging

David Heinemeier Hansson writes:

It’s christmas, baby, and do we have a present for you. …

The idea is to make a question & answer style page which is embellished in functionality by JavaScript (jQuery). Each question will be shown in a box with a tag hanging from the bottom of the box. When clicked, the …

Just tossed a new poll up. This time covering CSS frameworks, which we have never polled before. Kind of curious to see which of them is the most popular, among the people that actually use them. I’ve only included six …

.wishing {
you: happy-holidays !important;
}

Have a lovely day everyone! It’s definitely a white Christmas here in Portland. I plan to do a recap of the year next week and tell everyone just how thankful I am for this …

As always, fascinating results. I am part of the very smallest segment, in that I use an image-based social bookmarking service, ScrnShots, to keep track of a lot of my design inspiration. I’m not a nut about it though, …

jQuery 1.3 Beta

If you want to help test, all the details are here. Many rewrites of core areas like the selector engine and DOM Manipulation (append/prepend/before/after).

Absolute Columns

Dan Rubin hits the nail on the head with …