Articles

You can get pretty specific when declaring how you want text to look with CSS:

p {
  font-family: Verdana;
  background-color: #7A2121;
  color: #B93333;
  text-decoration: underline;
  word-spacing: Normal;
  text-align: left;
  letter-spacing: 1px;
  text-indent: 15px;
  line-height: 16px;
  font-size: 10px;
  font-weight: bold;
  font-style: italic;
  text-transform: uppercase;
}

And that’s not even all of it… But still, even if you get that specific, there are drastic differences from browser to browser on how the actual rendered text looks. The important lesson here is that … Read article “Font Rendering Differences: Firefox vs. IE vs. Safari”

Dan Cole has an interesting article up about creating a logo using only CSS. Why?

• Faster loading time
• Works with images disabled
• Scalable

Here is what it looks like:

Here is how it was done:

#tower1 {
position:absolute;
top:51px;
left:20px;
width:20px;
height: 30px;
background-color: #333;
}
#tower2 {
position:absolute;
top:31px;
left:45px;
width:20px;
height: 50px;
background-color: #33E;
}
#tower3 {
position:absolute;
top:11px;
left:70px;
width:20px;
height: 70px;
background-color: #3A3;
}
#tower4 {
position:absolute;
top:90px;
left:20px;
width:20px;
height: 10px;
background-color: #AAA;
}

… Read article “Create Your Logo with Pure CSS”

This is old news, but is worth of revisiting because of it’s preposterousness. You are able to add CSS to your MySpace pages. Cool. But where do you do that? Is there some little fun CSS editor they built in? Maybe a “theme editor” or the like? Nah.

You have to paste in your CSS into the “About Me” section of your profile.

My god that just crazy. But anyway, it works. I was able to add some stripes… Read article “Totally Ridiculous: CSS MySpace Modifications”

I really like this subtle effect on the fortuito.us blog. the text at the bottom of the page fades away. Even as you scroll the page content up and down, it appears as if it fades away into the bottom of the page.

This can be achieved with a transparent image that is in a fixed position on the page, like so:

#bottom_fade {
	z-index: 99;
	position: fixed;
	bottom: 0%;
	background-image: url("bottom-fade.png");
}

The high z-index helps insure it … Read article “CSS Trick: Fade Out the Bottom of Pages with a Fixed Position Image”

It can be a mighty cool effect to have images that nestle themselves in the four corners of your webpage. You can achieve this positioning with CSS fairly easily without affecting any of your other page content. You may also pick and choose which corners you want to use, if you don’t wish to use all four. Here is the basic theory:

#upper_left {
	position: absolute;
	top: 0;
	left: 0;
}
#upper_right {
	position: absolute;
	top: 0;
	right: 0%;
}

… Read article “Put Images in All Four Corners with CSS Positioning”

If you are adding video to your website, using embedded YouTube videos is definitely something to consider. In addition to saving hugely on bandwidth, releasing your video into the wild on YouTube might gain you some exposure you may have not otherwise gotten. One drawback is that you don’t have very much control of how this video gets displayed. Basically you get the simple YouTube player:

You don’t have control over much, including quality and the “related videos” that YouTube … Read article “Spice Up Embedded YouTube Videos with Background CSS”

It is a very healthy technique these days to center your entire website horizontally in the browser window (but be careful), especially nowadays with monitors getting bigger and bigger and with higher resolution. Sometimes it’s nice to break the rules though, for effect. Check out Panic’s website for their software Coda.

This is with the browser window fairly small:

[MISSING IMAGE, Sorry]

And this is with the browser window stretched out:

[MISSING IMAGE, Sorry]

The “Hangtab” is just … Read article “HangTab: Create a Sticky Tag from the Edge of the Browser Window (Even with Centered Content)”

There is a great tutorial on CSS Play that uses pure CSS to create flipbook style animation. The theory at work here is that there is there is a big stack of “slides” stacked on top of each other. On top of that is a series of tall rectangular “slices” made up of unique <a> elements. Each of the slides are pushed just outside of the div and the overflow is hidden, then when the :hover states are activated on … Read article “Using Pure CSS for Flipbook Style Animation”

Despite their status as mortal enemies, divs and tables can work together if you need them to. Because of the ability to use vertical centering in tables, it is a somewhat popular technique to use a single-celled table with both horizontal and vertical centering to absolutely center your page content in a browser window (mostly only useful for fixed-size content).

One important thing to remember when putting a div inside of a table is that the div needs to live … Read article “Using Divs Inside Tables”

Update: A more comprehensive article on floats is now out: All About Floats

You’ve heard of “clearing floats”, but do you really understand it? The whole problem is that floated objects do not add to the height of the object the reside in properly. As you can see below, these divs with the class “floated_box” are within the div “main_container”, yet on the page they are outside that container div.

#main_container {
 width: 400px;
 margin: 20px auto;
 border: 2px solid 

… Read article “The How and Why of Clearing Floats”