So I recently came across the idea of Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS) at An Event Apart San Francisco this year. The speaker was Nicole Sullivan, who is the leader in evangelizing and developing Object Oriented CSS. She makes a solid argument that best practice CSS techniques should be used and that we can build on those techniques to create even more efficient CSS for everyone involved.
If you’ve ever done the “dropdown dance” while developing your websites and avoided clunky code while still attempting to be standards compliant, accessible and semantic — then you know about the Suckerfish menus made popular on A List Apart. That article was published on November 7th, 2003, so that means we will be celebrating the sixth year anniversary of our favorite friendly neighborhood dropdown.
Most of you will be surprised by some of the CSS selectors that I’m writing about today. For instance, did you know can select a element based on a ending substring such as “.pdf”? BAM, add that selector to your a element and you can make all PDFs on your website italic and purple without any addition HTML! You xan do that with other substrings too!
We’re also going to go over some of the differences between more common selectors just so you know you’re efficiently implementing your code.
We all love CSS but keeping up with the latest techniques can be quite difficult at times. So for your convenience, I’ve compiled five tutorials that showcase useful and innovative techniques that you should know about.
[Just to be clear, I know some form of probably all these techniques may have existed for awhile but I feel these five choices can still be used/improved upon by us developers and/or not fully adapted yet even though they are known by many to be productive. A bump and a nod, if you will.]
(more…)
I’ve been making websites commercially for about five years now. In 2004, a year or two out of college — it was definitely a learning process for me. I originally graduated with a degree centered on print design, so programming in general was very new to me. During that time, table-based layout structure was still prevalent, so that’s how I started out.
With the debut of Internet Explorer 8 and the overall leading market share of IE7 — we will begin to see IE6 erode into history at a much quicker pace. Yes, let’s all praise the Lord for second. Done? Ok — IE6 came out roughly around September 2001, and has been driving web developers nuts ever since. Just last week, I cursed it’s foul name as I had to debug a problem that only surfaced in it’s vile window. Before we officially warn you about the door hitting your ass on the way out, let’s reminisce about some of the bad times we had:
Internet Explorer 6’s golden age, around 2002 and 2003 where it captured about 95% of the browser market unfortunately led to it being the main target of hackers, spy ware, phishing rings and nefarious scammers across the globe. Active X and Active scripting really just opened the door for these vile bastards and I think Microsoft products can be directly credited for phrases like “identity theft”.
(more…)
FOLLOW @typesett
SUBSCRIBE!