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CSS-Tricks

Tips, Tricks, and Techniques on using Cascading Style Sheets.

2-Year Anniversary GIVEAWAYYesterday

Happy Fourth of July all! A lovely day filled with fireworks and usually a day off of work (in the US, anyway). It’s also the anniversary of CSS-Tricks. It’s been two years now. It actually feels like it’s been longer than that sometimes, just because of how far the site and myself have come. Last year we didn’t do anything special, but I thought this year we’d kick it up a notch and celebrate a little harder. That’s right, it’s giveaway time!

Check out the prizes below. If you want to enter, the only requirement is to fill out this survey. (Notice the form is a Wufoo form, one of the prizes!). Winners will be picked totally at random. Of course provide your real name and real email address on the form so I can reach you if you win.

Today, I am literally on the road in a UHAUL truck moving from Portland, OR to Chicago, IL. Portland is an incredible city, I’m just moving to be a bit closer to family and friends and for a change of scenery. Please forgive me if the posts are light for the next few weeks while I settle in.

Because of the move, I’m gonna need a little time. I’m going to close the survey July 16th and announce the winners on July 17th.

The Go

New Screencast: Table Styling 2, Fixed Header and HighlightingJuly 2

Just a couple of quick tricks, from scratch, on coding up tables. We use the proper semantic tags for a table header and then set it to a fixed position so when scrolling the table the header is always visible. Then we implement row AND column highlighting with a bit of semi-clever JavaScript.

Get your hot and fresh design and development links at Script & Style!

New Poll: Would You Work on a Website You Thought Was a Stupid Business Idea?July 1

I’ve mused about this before, but I thought it would be good to put it to a poll this time. The discussion before was absolutely fascinating. Many folks saying that it’s our ethical duty to inform clients of our true opinions, and that part of the value of what we provide is those opinions. Many folks saying we should take the work and do it, as it’s not our job (or expertise) to judge business ideas (e.g. do you want your hair stylist to refuse to give you the haircut you want?).

Note that I did not include an option for “it’s complicated” or “it depends”. I’d rather just see the final judgment call. Poll is in the sidebar, and you can discuss below. RSS readers have to make the jump over to the site!

Get your hot and fresh design and development links at Script & Style!

Poll Results: Browser Choice Sans Developer ToolsJune 30

Yes, all the major browsers have development tools now, but I think most people are in agreement that you just can’t beat Firebug and the slew of other development-specific addons for Firefox. Outside of these tools, I often hear people complain about Firefox being slow, memory hungry, or crashy. I thought it would be interesting to ask about people’s browser choice if these development tools were not a factor, so just judging by UI and speed and features and such.

1 Firefox (56%, 4,615 Votes) 2 Safari (17%, 1,443 Votes) 3 Chrome (16%, 1,310 Votes) 4 Opera (6%, 542 Votes) 5 Internet Explorer (4%, 324 Votes) 6 Other (1%, 61 Votes)

Firefox topped the polls, showing that you guys still like the browsing experience on Firefox best even without fancy tools. Personally I like Firefox OK, but I have some crashing issues and I would definitely be a Safari man if mostly just used browsers for browsing. I think WebKit is the best rendering engine, and Safari 4 is just smoking fast all the way around. The web inspector with Safari is also fairly nice, it’s definitely second to Firebug, it just needs the “inspect” feature of Firebug (mousing around to drill down to the exact element) to really be of great general use. If there was a final version of Chrome for Mac I could even seeing going that route, since I really dig how it localizes each tab so you can’t crash the whole brow

The “Light” CMS TrendJune 29

CMSs are beautiful things. Just as CSS allows us to abstract the design away from the markup, a CMS allows us to use a database to abstract the content away from the markup. There are a zillion of them, each with different backend UI’s and different ways to doing things.

But CMSs are for web people. Even my beloved WordPress can be challenging to train/explain to someone who has no experience working with websites. Perhaps this is the motivation toward a new trend in CMSs I’m calling “light” CMSs. Each of them attempt to make the task of updating content on a website easier and more intuitive. This is largely at the cost of features. These are for simple, otherwise static websites where updating content is the name of the game.

Unify

Unify is the dead-simple, in-browser content editor that anyone can use. No CMS, no database, no backend interface, no proprietary tags or syntax. Just you, your website, and your browser.

Unify is still in private beta, but it sounds like it’s going well and should be out soon. You simply apply class names to block level elements you wish to be editable. You log into Unify directly on the website you wish to edit. You then are looking directly at the website again, but can click on t