Blogs

For years many of us struggled to describe the nature of the 'Box Model' to people; of how the various elements were calculated in respect of their dimensions; we explained the issue with IE and the - then named - 'Broken box Model' we explained how this box model differed in it's approach to borders, padding and content width, how to deal with two models, hacks & filters galore, if pressed further we might have gone as far as to try and point out that the W3C gave a reasoning of why the box model had to be broken down - in respect of dimensions - into separate parts as the 'content' had to t

Once again I have been lucky enough to receive books from Apress. One of the books is
Pro CSS for High Traffic Websites by Antony Kennedy and Inayaii de Leon.

This book takes a look at the process involved in maintaining the CSS for high traffic websites, when working in a team environment. It focuses on a few key areas, performance, frameworks, devices, accessibility, testing and debugging as well as the tools and processes you can use to make working in a team environment more productive.

I would like to thank everyone who is part of the CSS Creator Community for their effort, and wish you all a happy and prosperous new year. Thanks specially to those that take the time to answer questions. When you reply to a question, remember that members have different levels of experience and the forums are open to anyone. Some are professional web developers and designers, many are just starting out or building their own personal site. Try to be understanding.

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I have talked about generalising your style rules, or in other words, being less specific and simplifying your stylesheets. The basic idea is to write rules for the whole site not specific to a page or element. In theory this is nice, although most of us end up writing rules for specific elements. Working on an existing site you usually have to add a very specific rules to the stylesheet so that nothing else is messed up. That makes for long messy stylesheets.
If it's a new site the simplified build process usually goes something like:

1. visual design

Over the weekend I gave the CSS Layout Generator a long overdue update. Over 872,000 templates have been generated since it was first released at the end of 2003. That's a lot of templates, over 100,000 per year. Towards the end of next year it should hit the 1,000,000 mark. For a tool that has been so popular, quietly chugging away in the background, it was looking pretty old. So it was given a fresh face lift. I reorganized the form components to fit together better. Added basic HTML5 support, doctype and tag type selection for the columns.