Most CSS developers eventually come to learn that, because of code savings, using shorthand notation is usually best. For this reason, I strongly recommend using shorthand notation for almost all CSS values, including padding and margins.

While I encourage developers to use shorthand for padding and margins, I would also like to point out that there will be times when using longhand notation may be the better choice. Of course, in a case like this, it’s usually up to personal preference. But I have found certain instances where longhand notation made more logical sense from a performance perspective, as well as from a future-maintenance perspective.

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It seems like this should be one of the easiest things to understand in CSS. If you want a block-level element to fill any remaining space inside of its parent, then it’s simple — just add width: 100% in your CSS declaration for that element, and your problem is solved.

Not so fast. It’s not quite that easy. I’m sure CSS developers of all skill levels have attempted something similar to what I’ve just described, with bizarre results ultimately leading to head scratching and shruggingly resorting to experimenting with absolute widths until we find just the right fit. This is just one of those things in CSS that seems easy to understand (and really, it should be), but it’s sometimes not — because of the way that percentages work in CSS.

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While doing some testing for cross-browser compatibility on a few of my recent articles/tutorials, I came across some odd behaviour in Opera 10.53 when styling a list of links as block-level elements.

I haven’t done enough testing, but it could be that this problem is occurring on pages with very little content, because I’ve only seen the bug on my demo pages, which are usually bare-minimum HTML and CSS.

Nonetheless, this is quite an interesting bug that was confirmed by at least one of my Twitter followers, and which, after poking around a little bit, I was able to resolve, but I thought I’d share it since it is quite interesting.

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Since CSS3 has become such a big deal in the future-thinking minds of web designers today, I think it would be appropriate for front-end developers to begin formulating some best-practice habits and techniques so that any CSS3 development we do is done right, and we therefore are able to get CSS3 development off to a good start.

By no means do I assume that everything in this article is etched in stone and error-free, but I think this will be a good starting point for this topic, and I will be happy to add to or amend any points that anyone feels need adjusting or clarification.

Consider this a starting point for discussing best practices for CSS3, especially since there don’t seem to be any articles available yet that exclusively discuss CSS3 best practices.

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Recently, Chris Spooner of Line25 wrote a tutorial describing how to create a letterpress effect with CSS3’s text-shadow property.

In another article, Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks showed how he makes all the text links on his website feel more button-like using a simple bit of CSS positioning.

During a recent project I was working on, while messing around with the CSS3 text-shadow property, I serendipitously came across a simple way to combine the two different effects from those two articles to create a letterpress effect on active link states.

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