March 23, 2006

IEBlog : Layout Complete Announced at MIX06

If you are interested in news about Internet Explorer version 7, this entry from the IEBlog is interesting: IEBlog : Layout Complete Announced at MIX06. I noted the point about :hover on all elements. We recently talked about that at one of our meetings.

I also saw an article today that said that with Vista, Microsoft will end its practice of tying its internet browser together with Windows browser. You will be able to install version 7 as a standalone browser. (Isn't that what they said was not possible when Netscape dragged them into court?) The move should improve security.

March 19, 2006

March 2006 Meeting Report--Generated Content and Display: None

At our March meeting, we finished the topic of styling lists. We covered some loose ends from the February session and then went on to show how familiar properties like margin, padding, and border can be applied to lists or to individual list items. Using descendant selectors, we applied styles to list items depending on whether they were children of ordered lists or undordered lists.

We then played with generated content and showed how that property can be used to add text or images to the beginning or the end of an element using CSS. It is an interesting concept, but we saw that Internet Explorer does not support generated content, so its usefulness is limited right now. If you are interested in playing with this property, download the generated content test page from our samples and open the page in Firefox or Opera. To experiment, add or delete comment tags around the style declarations.

We then started with the display property. The first value we considered was "none," and we showed how it can be used to substitute a graphic for a top level heading so that we could add a logo without affecting the underlying HTML. The sample page is also on the website. Comment out the style declarations to see the underlying HTML. Or, if you have Firefox, you can just open the file and at the top Firefox menu, go to View/Page Style/No Style to toggle the style sheet on and off.

In April, we will continue with the display property. Please make a note: The April meeting will be on April 22, the fourth Saturday of the month, due to the school's schedule. Mark your calendar and join us.

March 14, 2006

March 18 Meeting Announcement

The PACS CSS Workshop will be meeting this Saturday at the usual 9-10 hour.

This month we will finish up styling lists. We will tie up some loose ends and a cover a couple of leftover issues from last month.

After that, I want to get into the DISPLAY property. There are several values that can be used with that property, but we will just work on three of them, inline, block, and that confused fellow called inline-block. We will see how practical that last one really is, but the first two will set us up to do some interesting navigation styles.

If you are using a book to study along with our sessions, read about these topics, and we will do some experimenting to see how the DISPLAY property works.