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: 10%

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: 7%

There are a lot of times when you want something to just be a few pixels higher than it is. Unfortunately for you the container of that element starts to soon. So you need to move it outside of the box. Your options in CSS? You can either use relative positioning or you can use negative margin. I’ll go over in another article so for now we will discuss the handy ability to use negative margin on objects. (more…)

Popularity: 6%

I actually found something out recently that I thought I would share with everyone. Somewhat of a minor little detail about CSS but still interesting none the less. It could come up, or possibly change in later versions of CSS but right now both ways are going to validate just fine. It turns out that when you end your last CSS attribute for a selector you don’t have to have your semicolon on the end of it. (more…)

Popularity: 5%

It seems that a lot of people have trouble migrating their sites over to CSS in place of tables when they run into simple gallery-like issues. The problem of getting 5 rows of items to all look even and function like they would in tables without using tables. Some of course would argue that a gallery is tablature data, I would disagree. Tables should be avoided for pretty much everything. Especially simple row/column galleries. When I have to create such a thing I will use lists in place of the tables. (more…)

Popularity: 5%

Are you trying to get two or more columns to appear to be the same height with CSS? There is a trick in doing this that is extremely easy and by far the best method. This is a question that I hear quite a bit, because currently CSS by default doesn’t allow you to be able to do this. If you are wanting two columns, say a navigation column and a body copy column, to be the same height you can set them at a fixed height but this isn’t a good idea. Especially if you have a dynamic site, because with a dynamic site it is impossible to tell how much content is going to be where in your site. You definitely don’t want to have to go in and “manually” fix the column height every time the site gets updated. (more…)

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I have been asked questions recently about using different sets of styles on elements and thought I would briefly touch on the subject to explain a little further. Have you ever wanted to use styleA and styleB on the same div? Well with classes you can, you can easily specify multiple classes on what div or any element that you want without any trouble at all. (more…)

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Using shorthand CSS can save some 1’s and 0’s in your stylesheets which add up if you have a busy web site. Just think, all those extra lines of codes taking up valuable bytes are adding up on that server. It may seem minimal at first but it does take up some space once you have enough sites on your server. Even if you don’t care that much about bandwidth or server stress- you are wasting valuable keystrokes by typing extra attributes and properties in your CSS. (more…)

Popularity: 29%

It looks like the technology behind Safari, Webkit, is starting to support downloadable fonts. This could mean we could use more advanced forms of typography within web sites in the near future. Currently Safari is the only one I know about that is supporting the CSS @font-face feature but it is expected that the other browsers will soon join suit.

It is exciting to think about using fonts other then the classic web safe fonts that you would find across various operating systems. (more…)

Popularity: 5%

Safari is one of those tricky browsers that aren’t the most cooperative but there aren’t many hacks for it that will work. Unlike IE that allows you to target the browser directly easily, Safari doesn’t offer that solution within XHTML. I could only come up with 2 ways to use CSS hacks or tricks for Safari specifically. The best step towards making sure all browsers work the same for your site is to use valid XHTML Strict code, this helps most of the time. But, sometimes you do have to venture away from that ideal. (more…)

Popularity: 12%