In March I wrote about some of my least favourite parts of CSS. Admittedly, that was a pretty negative post, and I’ve even slightly changed my opinion of a few of those things, thanks to the comments.
But I like CSS a lot. So as a follow-up, I thought it would only be fair to list some of the things in CSS that I think work very well and thus are valuable to know and use often.
I think everyone should be willing to look back at their older work and laugh and realize how far they’ve come. Even the best designers, developers, and bloggers have past work that they cringe at today. Heck, I cringe at stuff I wrote six months ago!
So with the help of Archive.org and WordPress’s easy-to-navigate paging system, I thought it would be fun to cause a whole bunch of people tons of embarrassment by rounding up some of the earliest articles I could find on various popular web design blogs. Enjoy.
It’s sometimes intimidating and often ridiculous how quickly this industry moves forward. Just when you think you’ve reached “front-end developer” status, you realize there’s so much you still don’t know, or else only know superficially.
Others have expressed their views about our industry and how frustrating it feels, and still others feel that too much is asked of front-end developers.
As many of us have learned, vendor prefixes are a pain in the butt to maintain, and it’s great that CSS preprocessors and client-side scripts are available to help in this regard.
Although I’ve recommended that the standard property be listed after the vendor-specific lines, for “future-proofing” the code, I’m starting to think that might be bad advice in some circumstances.
We all know that CSS colors can be declared using hex, RGB, RGBA, HSL, and HSLA. But colors in those forms are not very memorable (unless they’re greys or something).
While I’m sure we all know that common colors like red, green, blue, etc. can be declared by name, CSS has quite a few not-so-conventional color names. Here are a bunch, with their colors represented as backrounds on each paragraph.
I thought it would be interesting to list the release history for major versions of each of the big browsers.
Two factors that I believe will play a role in eventually abolishing browser version numbers are the rapid release schedule, and auto-updating — both of which, if I’m not mistaken, are Google Chrome inventions.
Each version history table timeline has a single colored row that represents the browser release that took the longest.
Every programming language has its good parts and its ugly parts. CSS (I know, it’s not a programming language, but whatevs) is no different.
In this post, I do nothing but vent. I’ve been coding websites for almost 12 years, and I’ve been doing CSS layouts for nearly half that (yeah, I was a late bloomer). I’ve come to realize what is good and bad about CSS, and here are what I consider “the bad parts”.
There have been numerous articles written by some very reputable people discussing the topic of CSS specificity.
I think it’s great if a CSS developer wants to learn the ins and outs of specificity, because it is an important aspect of how CSS works. But I’m going to put forth an argument here that CSS specificity is quite overrated and, in fact, learning about CSS specificity has the potential to degrade the quality of your code.
Sol Ushon: Hey, Stan. Can I get your opinion on something?
Stanley Derds: Sure thing, Sol.
Sol Ushon: Why should I avoid presentational class names in my HTML?
Stanley Derds: Because presentational elements don’t belong in HTML. Avoid them like the Bubonic Plague.
Now that the numbers for IE6 and IE7 usage are diminishing rapidly, more and more development teams are starting to weed out support for those older browsers.
Most readers will probably have removed IE6 completely from the equation and soon IE7 will follow. Despite IE8 still having the highest share of any single browser version, the demise of IE6/7 now allows us to be more creative with CSS selectors.
This post will provide a comprehensive review of support for CSS3 selectors in the most troublesome browsers (guess which ones?). Each selector links to the appropriate location in the CSS3 spec.
