The other day I visited the jQuery Conference page, and immediately fell in love with the beautiful design and CSS3 technique applied to the tabbed navigation on that page. Visit the site in a Webkit-based browser (Chrome or Safari) or Opera 10.5, and you’ll see a nice “glowing” rollover effect along with a subtle inner shadow at the bottom of the inactive tabs.
But that’s not all; they’ve also applied some rounded corners and gradients to complete a very nice effect. All with no images — just progressively enhanced with CSS3 so it degrades in non-supportive browsers. I immediately set out to recreate the effect, and I thought I’d write it up so you can see how CSS3 can create intuitive and beautiful interfaces with no images.
I don’t consider myself an application developer. I think I have some knowledge of application design principles, but it’s something I’d like to improve on, especially in the area of JavaScript and Ajax-driven applications.
If you’ve ever clicked on a footnote link in a Wikipedia article, you’ve probably noticed that two things happen: (1) the link brings you to the footnote section at the bottom of the page; and (2) the selected footnote is highlighted with a different color. In a list of footnotes, this feature makes it easy for the reader to visually access the appropriate footnote.
Not too long ago I wrote an article for Six Revisions called Getting Started with jQuery that covered some important things (concept-wise) that beginning jQuery developers should know. This article is the complete opposite; there’s no concepts, no principles, and very little lecturing — just some straight example code with brief descriptions demonstrating what you can do with jQuery.
CSS opacity has been a bit of a trendy technique for a few years now, and it’s been especially frustrating for developers trying to implement opacity (also referred to as CSS transparency) in a cross-browser fashion, because it’s taken a while for the different browsers to finally agree on settings. There is still not a universal method to ensure opacity settings work on all currently-used browsers, but things have improved in the last little while.
In the past I’ve displayed some serious animosity towards the CSS 
It’s common nowadays for bloggers to monetize their blogs through the use of strategically-placed ad blocks. BuySellAds ad blocks are the most popular in the web design community. You’ll sometimes also see AdSense ads placed at the top of articles or in other spots.
Last year I began a series called “Ajax From the Ground Up”, that consisted of two articles describing how to implement Ajax from scratch using pure JavaScript. Because I was busy with other things, and due to minimal interest shown in the articles, I never wrote the third part to the series.
I had to qualify that title, because by far the easiest way to get hundreds of comments on any blog post is to give something away to a randomly chosen commenter. But as bloggers we’re always in search of ways to create a little bit of buzz to increase page views and overall reader participation through re-tweets or comments.
Although the lack of cross-browser CSS selector support has caused a number of useful CSS selectors to go almost unnoticed, developers can still manipulate styles on their pages using some of these little-used selectors through jQuery.
