May 28, 2006

May 2006 Meeting Report--Navigation Menus

This month we finished up with the basics of the display: property. We then reviewed some of the styles that can be used with anchor (link) tags and reminded ourselves that context-sensitive styling will let you define different styles for links on the same page depending on how they are identified in your HTML.

We went on to navigation menus by taking a list of links and styling it to display as a vertical, sidebar-type menu. I used the menu that Reed Gustow drafted for the PACS Web Design SIG site as an example and stripped out the navigation HTML and CSS into a separate file. This file is now in our Samples section. The code is annotated so that you can play with the styles and try out some new ideas. Note that Bob Morgan has beaten everyone to the punch--he used the menu as the basis for a new sidebar for the HTML Workshop page. Sincere flattery.

Our June meeting is the second Saturday, June 10, due to the school calendar. This meeting is the last until September. We will continue with styling menus and get into more complex ideas. See you then.

May 17, 2006

May 20 Meeting Announcement

The next meeting of the PACS CSS Workshop will be this Saturday, May 20, at the usual 9-10 hour.

At this session, we will begin putting together some of the elements we have covered in the last few months and use those elements to style navigation menus. This topic might take us through the final two sessions this year, and there should be a lot of interesting ideas that you can play with over the summer, at least on cloudy days.

This month's PACS meeting will be end-to-end with presentations of interest to web designers. After CSS, we will have the regular workshops for Javascript and Flash in the morning. The Web Design SIG at 1:00 will be about installing a forum on a website--Reed Gustow will show how he did it for the Web Design SIG site. And in between, Reed will be the presenter at the main PACS meeting at noon discussing free tools for making websites.

There is so much going on, it will be tough to take a break for those cafeteria hot dogs, but that's OK--there will be a lot of good information to take away from the meeting. Check the PACS website for the schedule of events and for more details.

See you Saturday.

May 04, 2006

stu nicholls | CSS PLaY | experiments with cascading style sheets

This website called stu nicholls | CSS PLaY | experiments with cascading style sheets is getting a lot of attention lately. Rich Sias sent it to me, and Frank Stepanski has noted it.

The site is all about CSS and stretching its limits. Some of the examples are interactive items that one might usually associate with scripting. And it appears so far that the cross browser support is excellent.

I hope to be using some of these examples in upcoming CSS workshops.