The Early Bird Catches the CSS: Planning Structural HTML

I came across another interesting article called Wise-Women: Tutorial: The Early Bird Catches the CSS: Planning Structural HTML. The writer is a teacher and web designer. She describes another take on the process of moving from HTML-only design to HTML as the foundation for a CSS-styled web page. But the process described is also generally applicable to tagging a page so that it is ready to be styled.

May Notes: The Box Model

At the May meeting, we reviewed the parent-child structure of an HTML document and then continued into a discussion of the box model. I used this sample document to begin illustrating the different properties and values that can be applied to the box created by a block element.
We will continue showing how to style a box at the next meeting. The subject of positioning boxes on a web page is one that we will hold until later in our workshop.

How to Convert Your Site to CSS

I recently ran across this article in Macromedia - Edge : May 20, 2005 describing a process for converting a website to CSS. The original article is in Flash, but this link is to the printable version.

The process can be tedious, and as you can tell from the article, not even Macromedia has a push-button solution. But the results are worth the effort, and this article lays out a nice road map to getting there.

May 21 Meeting Announcement

The next session of the PACS CSS Workshop will on May 21 at our usual 9-10 hour.

This month we will finish up with the parent-child concept--we should be able to do that pretty quickly. We will then get into the box model. This topic is important not just for learning new ways of styling the look of your page, but also as the basis for positioning elements on your page. We will get into positioning later, but this month we lay the foundation for learning some powerful formatting options.

See you on the 21st.

A Design Timeline

I am going to show this site MBoffin.com - Designline - A Design Timeline at the next meeting, but it is so interesting, I thought I should blog it. The writer is contemplating what the process is to create a web page. He shows step by step how he did it. Click on the animated gif to see his progress from HTML to CSS.

I don't know if everyone would agree with his approach, but it is what I have been stressing in the workshop--it all starts with clean HTML, and the CSS gets added on top. Look at how many different looks he can create with the same basic HTML.

Five Questions with CSS Author Dave Shea

CSS Zen Garden is one of the sites that I list on the Resources page. The director has written a book about CSS using that site as an example. There is an interview at the Peachpit Press site called Five Questions with CSS Author Dave Shea that members might find interesting.