December 22, 2005

Calling All CSS Designers - Free Copy of TopStyle

If you think your CSS talents are sufficiently evolved, you might consider entering this styling contest described at Calling All CSS Designers - Free Copy of TopStyle. The project is kind of like Zen Garden. The site gives you the template, and you add the CSS. The prize is a copy of Nick Bradbury's excellent CSS editor.

December 18, 2005

December 2005 Meeting Notes: Pseudo Classes

At our December meeting, we finished the topic of pseudo selectors: pseudo classes and pseudo elements. I have posted the outline that we followed for a quick reference. If you download the sample page that I uploaded with the November meeting notes, you can play with these selectors.

It is important to check your work across browsers. As we saw this month, support is particularly disappointing in Internet Explorer.

December 13, 2005

Good article on web fonts

SitePoint just published a nice article on The Anatomy of Web Fonts. There is a lot of background on the theory of fonts on web pages, and the emphasis is on using CSS effectively.

December 11, 2005

December 17 Meeting Announcement

Our next meeting will be this Saturday, December 17, at our usual time and place.

This month we will continue, and hopefully finish, with pseudo classes and elements. Our focus will be on styling links.

Our next topic will be lists. The most common way to create menus with CSS is to put the links in a list and then style the list. In the process of discussing lists, we will cover descendant selectors, another way to improve the efficiency of your style sheets.

If you have the Meyer book, read the relevant chapters, but be aware that some of the subjects he covers are not well supported by browsers and some are somewhat advanced in that they relate more to XML documents that to HTML documents. We will sort it all out Saturday.