Web Design Tutorials

Just to clarify beforehand, this article does not constitute an argument in favour of using multi-line CSS blocks over single-line CSS blocks.

But once in a while I peek at people’s CSS code, or try to follow along with a tutorial discussing some CSS topics, and notice that the CSS isn’t very easy to scan through, and the main problem is often white space, or you could say “breathing room”.

So, I’m going to explain here how I think CSS should be laid out (mostly using examples that incorporate multi-line blocks) for easier readability and scannability.

Admittedly, this is probably not the kind of CSS property that’s going to be used in every design, but it is a very useful one when you need it.

The property I’m talking about is the CSS word-wrap property (also referred to in the modern spec as overflow-wrap) and, believe it or not, it works in every single browser, including all versions of old IE. In fact, it was even supported as far back as IE5.

After redesigning this website, and realizing that I’ve been way too nonchalant about different window sizes, I came across an issue that probably occurs in a lot of different layouts.

The problem happens under the following circumstances: (1) The header and footer of the page have no specified width; (2) The content area has a specified width, and is centered using margin: auto; (3) The window is resized below the content area’s width, or the window starts out below the set width of the content area.

In most cases, this issue will go unnoticed, because generally speaking, sites are designed to fit within the 960px standard width, which will be fine for most users. Because my monitor’s resolution is set to higher than 1024×768 (which is small in the web design community nowadays), the problem was occurring on my own site, which has for a while now been designed for a larger than average width.

CSS has a pretty useful property called white-space that probably goes pretty unnoticed among CSS beginners. You can probably live without this property for quite some time, but once you learn how to use it, it will come in very handy and you’ll find yourself going back to it over and over again.

This article will attempt to describe the different values for the CSS white-space property, and how each one can be used. I’m going to try to explain each value in a very practical, no-nonsense way, and I’ll do my best not to be overly technical.

One of the huge benefits to using CSS3 is the ability to create image-like effects without the use of images. CSS3 gradients, shadows, and rounded corners have helped designers greatly in this area.

While browsing the website of well-known web hosting company Media Temple, I stumbled upon their Labs page and noticed they’re using a block hover effect on the list of items, and the hover state uses (what I assume is) the border-radius property when the background becomes visible.

The other day I came across a useful site called ScriptSrc.net that allows you to get up-to-date script tag links that point to your favourite JavaScript libraries.

The site has a clickable corner ad promo to get people to “spread the word”. I thought using CSS3 there would be a better way to position such a corner advertisement (or promo, or whatever), because the clickable area for the ad on ScriptSrc.net is actually too big. In some cases, you might prefer the clickable area to be bigger, but I think it’s always best to keep the clickable area limited to the actual ad.

At some point, you may have a situation where you want to center multiple elements (maybe <div> elements, or other block elements) on a single line in a fixed-width area. Centering a single element in a fixed area is easy. Just add margin: auto and a fixed width to the element you want to center, and the margins will force the element to center.

There really should be a similar simple way to center multiple elements evenly spaced. It would be nice if CSS had a property called “box-align” which you could set to “center” then the child elements would be centered evenly within their parent.

Well, you can achieve something similar by taking advantage of CSS’s flexibity with “recasting” elements (for lack of a better term).

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.