Category CSS

CSS is the language for styling websites, including their colors, layouts, and typography. With CSS, you can propagate styles to your HTML components, ensuring a consistent design across all types of devices, browsers, and operating systems. We highly recommend Heydon Pickering’s introduction to two key CSS features on creating consistent designs with minimal effort, in addition to using Semantic CSS With Intelligent Selectors.

!important CSS Declarations: How and When to Use Them

by Louis Lazaris

9 min read
No meows just yet

November 2, 2010 — When the CSS1 specification was drafted in the mid to late 90s, it introduced !important declarations that would help developers and users easily override normal specificity when making changes to ... Read More…

248 more articles

Trevor Morris wrote

Transparent CSS Sprites

October 31, 2010 — One of the most useful front-end development techniques of recent years is the humble “CSS Sprites”. The technique was popularised by Dave Shea on A List Apart in 2004 with his article CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death. CSS Sprites are a relatively simple technique … Read More…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 New Useful CSS Techniques, Tutorials and Tools

October 12, 2010 — These are great times for front-end developers. After months of exaggerated excitement about HTML5 and CSS3, the web design community now starts coming up with CSS techniques that actually put newly available technologies to practical use instead of abusing them for pure … Read More…

Jon Raasch wrote

Five Useful CSS/jQuery Coding Techniques For More Dynamic Websites

September 21, 2010 — Interactivity can transform a dull static website into a dynamic tool that not only delights users but conveys information more effectively. In this post, we’ll walk through five different coding techniques that can be easily implemented on any website to provide a … Read More…

Rachel Andrew wrote

How To Use CSS3 Media Queries To Create a Mobile Version of Your Website

July 19, 2010 — This article will demonstrate a technique that uses part of CSS3 that is also unsupported by Internet Explorer 8. However, it doesn’t matter as one of the most useful places for this module is somewhere that does have a lot of support - small devices such as the … Read More…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Start Using CSS3 Today: Techniques and Tutorials

June 17, 2010 — We have been publishing articles about CSS3 for a while now, and we keep receiving angry e-mails from some developers who complain that it doesn’t make sense to use CSS3 today. Yes, Internet Explorer doesn’t support most CSS3 properties. And yes, CSS3 vendor … Read More…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 New Useful CSS Techniques, Tools and Tutorials

June 10, 2010 — Over the last years we’ve got a pretty good understanding of what CSS does, how it works and how we can use it for our layouts, typography and visual presentation of the content. However, there are still some attributes that are not so well-known; also, CSS3 offers us … Read More…

Louis Lazaris wrote

The Principles Of Cross-Browser CSS Coding

June 7, 2010 — It is arguable that there is no goal in web design more satisfying than getting a beautiful and intuitive design to look exactly the same in every currently-used browser. Unfortunately, that goal is generally agreed to be almost impossible to attain. Some have even gone on … Read More…

Trent Walton wrote

Connecting The Dots With CSS3

May 27, 2010 — As a web community, we’ve made a lot of exciting progress in regards to CSS3. We’ve put properties like text-shadow & border-radius to good use while stepping into background-clip and visual effects like transitions and animations. We’ve also spent a great deal of time … Read More…

The Smashing Editorial wrote

CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 Help Cheat Sheets (PDF)

May 13, 2010 — Today we are glad to release two useful cheat sheets that will help you quickly look up the right CSS 2.1-property or an obscure CSS 3 property. The style sheets contain most important properties, explanations and keywords for each property. The CSS 2.1 Help Sheet covers … Read More…