Tony's blog

z-index changes the stacking order or layering of positioned elements. If no element is positioned then the stacking order gets higher, closer to the front, for each descendant.

Each positioned element that has been assigned a z-index other then auto, creates a stacking context, which may be easier to explain in another context lets use a sandpit. The sandpit is positioned absolutely so the children don't move it an make a bigger mess and has a z-index of 1.

CSS gives web designers the power to style many pages simply and to change the look of a whole site in one place. If you look at a site as a whole you can simplify your style sheets and make them smaller and easier to maintain.

Let's look at the basic structure of a rule to make the rest of the explanation easier to understand.
selectors{property:value;}
There are different types of selectors which I am not going into here except to say that you can have multiple selectors separated by a comma.

Santa is bringing us a shiny new server.
Yes, it was many months ago I first promised to get a new server and now is finally it is going to happen. Thanks for being patient.

By the second week of January we should have finished the move to the new server.
Hopefully the downtime will be minimal.

Have a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and look forward to a faster site in the new year.

Most of you should be aware that Microsoft have released IE7. You should also be aware that they plan start pushing it out through automatic updates from the beginning of November. So hopefully you have already added it to your list of browsers to test with. In a rather short time I expect IE7 will become more popular then IE6. Unfortunately we still wont be able to disregard IE6 for a very long time. I wonder how soon people will stop testing with IE5 or have you already.

While we are talking of browsers how can we not mention the final release of Firefox 2. After downloaded and installed Firefox 2, I am very pleased to discover that it has inbuilt spell checking. My spelling is atrocious, (I used spell checker on that one ), so to have an inbuilt spell checker to me is fantastic. Check out the list of other cool features in this release of Firefox.

Markus Mielke has posted a long list of the changes made to IE7 on the IE7 Blog. There is a lot to get your head around so here is an overview with a couple of the highlights.

Most of the changes require IE7 to be in standards mode, so the site must have a valid standards compliant doctype.

• Nearly all the IE bugs listed on Position is Everything have been fixed.


• Hover works on all elements, great news for CSS menu's.


• Min/max width and height is now supported.