CSS Naked day is the day that sites shed their CSS that makes our sites look good to show how seperatation of presentation and structure is so important in web design. To find out more about CSS Naked Day visit http://naked.dustindiaz.com

Popularity: 2%

I have received several emails recently about creating galleries with CSS. Most people still use tables to create your basic image gallery in CSS. There is a much simpler way to do this with a list and some very easy CSS. Depending on what you want to do with your photo gallery you may want to have a caption or more information available on the page. This simple method can be expanded for use on staff pages or real estate sites to list houses for sale.

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Popularity: 4%

There are a lot of different ways to organize your HTML to ensure that others, and yourself, are able to easily navigate their ways around your code. One of the best methods for helping to order your code for others is using comment tags to show where certain tags end. The best tag to use this for are divs, at the end of each div assigning a <!-- divName --!> to show that it is ending here can help others to understand what is going on and where it is ending within code. This becomes even more helpful when you are dealing with dynamic sites (as most of us strictly deal with), especially those in content management systems.
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Popularity: 7%

We have all used the great Firefox extensions that make our lives easier, there are thousands of lists out there of the top 10-15 Firefox extensions for web developers. There is of course a lot of resistance from web developers against using Internet Explorer because of its lack of standards support. A lot of this is carried over from IE 6 being so fundamentally broken at rendering web pages with CSS. There are always time though when we need to test web sites in IE6 or IE7 and just like we use our extensions for development in Firefox— it is a huge help to have add-ons installed for Internet Explorer that will allow us to do our job more effectively.

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Popularity: 24%

There is a lot of talk amongst designers about why web standards are important, sometimes it is a bragging point to say that you know a lot about CSS and HTML and can make a good site within standards. Some of it is just a line to make whatever you are doing sound better. I hear a lot of local Oklahoma web design companies talk about web standards but for the most part I see some of them still designing in tables or not even getting the bare minimums in when it comes to web standards.

This article is going to be directed at web design firms, web design clients and web designers everywhere. The importance of web standards is more then just something to say, it is the way the web should be designed. There is more then just passing an HTML or CSS validator when it comes to standards. Even so there is more to making a site pass coding standards, accessibility being the primary objective. Accessibility is usability, it isn’t just about disabled it is about ensuring that your site will work from the time it is published until the end of time if it needs to. I’ll go over different web standards and accessibility guidelines and how they can be implemented, used and maintained better then just exporting a document out of Adobe Photoshop or throwing together an insane unaccessible image map.
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Popularity: 80%

There are a lot of reasons that you would want to replace simple text with an image. One of the biggest reasons is the benefit of getting the text that is within the image for search engines. This method is used mostly for site headings. Say you were making a site about “Freelance Oklahoma Web Design” you would want to be sure to include that in your first H1 but you don’t want to use plain text to do it. So you would be creative and ensure that you are getting the same information that is within your fancy image into your heading tag. This way you can ensure that your site topic is best read by search engines without losing any of your design benefits of creating custom imagery for your design comp.

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Popularity: 76%

There are a lot of different ways to display text using CSS, some of them are rather straight forward. Like assigning a color or setting the font size of your text. However, there are several text effects that you may not know about that can manipulate more then just the color or font size of the text. You can literally transform the text using various CSS rules. I’m going to show you a few that I think are kind of cool, some are handy and others are nearly useless in design. But they are all there and available to use, and I’m going to show you how.

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Popularity: 45%

It is important to use lists in navigation for semantics, accessibility, aesthetics and flexibility. Not using lists for navigation can lead to confusion, inaccessibility and unclear markup. There has been an article published from a popular CSS tutorial web site that is slightly misleading and generally not the best advice for developers and designers. It appears as though most of the people in the comments noticed right away some of the holes in the attempted “listless navigation” theory. I thought I would address the importance of using lists for navigation here. For some this may be an obvious practice in design but it is important enough to be addressed. I would like to be clear that I mean no disrespect to David Walsh or Chris Coyier, I’m sure they both only had good intentions of showing off what can be done with CSS.

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Popularity: 43%

Opera’s CTO announced that they are filing a formal complain against Microsoft and the Internet Explorer browser. Their complaint is about their lack of support for web standards and the disservice they have done to the web community at large. Opera calls for the support of the web community in this charge.

This is fantastic, I’m glad that Opera has stepped up and shown their support for web standards vocally. Most in the web community have known that the Opera web browser has been the largest supported and advocate of web standards. Not many outside of the web design community have been aware of this though. Most don’t even realize that web standards is an issue. I hope that something actually comes out of this, I would like to see an update that makes IE7 web compliant. It is insane for such a large company to know adhere to web standards such as Microsoft does.

Popularity: 9%

Relative positioning can come in handy in CSS, you are much more powerful as a designer if you can place things in the exact location you are pressing towards. There are a lot of times when you want to put an object somewhere and you are unsure of how you are going to place it. Whether it be just outside of your box or just above another object. The position of your object in your HTML document is important in design. You can’t always just use the restrictive box for your web sites, web designs more and more are breaking out of the box form and becoming much more elegant designs. (more…)

Popularity: 6%