Tony's blog

I can't believe the forum is now 9 years old. That must be like 100 in web years. The site is actually a few months older then the forum and started as way to display a tool I called the CSS Creator which allowed you to make style changes to live sites. Here's a link to the wayback machine from December 2002, and the CSS Generator as it is today.

Thanks to all who help make this a great place to solve CSS issues and browser issues.

This morning I upgraded MySQL on the server, unfortunately during the process some tables belonging to this site and a couple of others on the server became corrupt. After many attempts to repair the corrupt tables I eventually gave in and resorted to restoring form yesterday's backup. The good news is the site is back up. The bad news is we lost close to a day of topics, replies and registrations. I'd like to apologize to everyone, especially anyone who posted a topic hoping for help during the missing period.

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.

Best reply

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