April 21 Meeting Report: More on Backgrounds

This month, we continued working on background images and spent some time on setting different backgrounds for different elements on a page. The default background color of a webpage is transparent, per HTML specs, so even though background images are not inherited, they will show through your child elements unless you declare either a background color or image for that child. And in case the image does not load, you should always do both.

We put a background on headings and inline elements, and used the background-attachment property to let a background image stay in a fixed position while the page scrolls.

In the process of all this, we talked about alpha transparency of images as well as some philosophical questions on webpage design.

For a quick review of the background properties we have been working with, see this recent post with a link to an article on this subject.

Builder.com article: Precisely control page and element backgrounds with CSS

The timing could not be better for this article from Builder.com on CSS background properties. It is a good review of the styles that we have been covering recently.

April 21 Meeting Announcement

The next meeting of the PACS CSS Workshop will be this Saturday, April 21, at 9 - 10 am.

This month, we will continue working with background images. We will cover a couple of topics that came up last month but that we left with some open questions. I figured out the answers, and I will clear up all confusion in a matter of minutes. We will also take a quick look at the standard baseline style sheet that Eric Meyer recently published on his blog. I have a link to that article in a previous entry.

Our main subjects will be techniques for using multiple images for backgrounds and styling a sidebar to have a background color that goes the full length of a page. One of the techniques will be the famed Faux Columns, and we should be able to cover that topic in our allotted time.

Eric Meyer: Standard Baseline Style Sheet

Eric Meyer recently blogged about a baseline style sheet that he has developed: Eric's Archived Thoughts: Reworked Reset. I found this article interesting because we have had Web Design SIG presentations recently where we have discussed basic default styles as starting points for webpages. Meyer takes this idea to the next level. Check the previous blog for comments by some of his readers to see how he revised the first version.