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: 6%

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: 7%

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…)

Popularity: 8%

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…)

Popularity: 3%

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: 31%

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: 6%

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: 18%

You ever had that frustrating div that would stop just short of wrapping your content like it is supposed to? Usually this div will have a background image or color that you need to go all the way around the content. There are cases where this has come up for me and there are usually two things you can do one of them is to fix the problem as you have accidentally set a property to it that doesn’t need to be there in the CSS. The other is you can add something to it to help wrap the div around your content. I’ll talk about both of these methods a little more in depth but they are quick and easy solutions for the stubborn div. (more…)

Popularity: 7%

I get this question quite a bit for people that need to test their web sites on IE6 mostly that already have IE7 installed. I have found a great piece of software from TredoSoft that does just this. It basically installed IE 3.0, IE 4.01, IE 5.01, IE 5.5 and IE 6 on your computer to let you test your web page on them. This is all assuming you have IE7 already installed. If for whatever reason you don’t want to replace your IE6 with IE7 they also have a stand alone IE7 that you can install to test your web pages on.

I mostly use this software for testing web pages on IE6 standalone. This is a very useful software for testing your web page. For those of you wishing to test Safari you may know that it has been released for PC, but it is still a little buggy.

Unfortunately I don’t have a good way right now to test other browsers on your Mac but I will keep an eye out for something that does. Hopefully the company will create IE6 stand alone for the Mac soon. Currently it does work for Windows XP and Vista though.

Popularity: 14%

This week it is a hack that I am providing for everyone to enjoy, it allows you to easily add a quick style within your existing style sheet to target internet explorer. This can help so you don’t have to check your ie CSS file if is just a simple margin adjustment. Which as we all know internet explorer has some issues with, especially internet explorer 6. The underscore hack is pretty basic but I will go over the various uses for it and touch on what browsers it affects and which browsers ignore it. (more…)

Popularity: 6%