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Beginner Articles

HTML & CSS - The VERY Basics

HTML and CSS files are, quite literally, just text files. You don't need any special software to create them, although a nice code editor is helpful...

I’m really lazy about using <abbr></abbr> tags for acronyms. Most people who read a techy blog like this probably understand them, but surely there are some visitors who don’t where a simple tooltip explanation would be beneficial. Maybe with this …

CSS is to HTML as a CMS is to… HTML

From the desk of important beginner concepts:

You have a website with 100 pages on it. All 100 pages use the same style.css file. You’d like to change the background color of every single page. You make one adjustment in …

All About Floats

What is “Float”?

Float is a CSS positioning property. To understand its purpose and origin, we can look to print design. In a print layout, images may be set into the page such that text wraps around them as needed. …

Web Nerd Terminology (Explained)

As happens with any weird niche societal group, us web nerds have developed some language of our own. Some of this language is perfectly acceptable English, but still sounds weird to an outsider. I thought I’d throw together a list …

The CSS Box Model

At the risk of over-repeating myself: every element in web design is a rectangular box. This was my ah-ha moment that helped me really start to understand CSS-based web design and accomplish the layouts I wanted to accomplish. We’ve talked …

Removing The Dotted Outline

Anchor links (<a>’s) by default have a dotted outline around them when the become “active” or “focused”. In Firefox 3, the color is determined by the color of the text. I believe in previous versions and in some other browsers …

The Difference Between ID and Class

ID’s and Classes are “hooks”

We need ways to describe content in an HTML/XHTML document. The basic elements like <h1>, <p> and <ul> will often do the job, but our basic set of tags doesn’t cover every possible type of …

Intermediate Articles

On :target

The :target pseudo selector in CSS is both pretty cool and pretty limited in what it can do. In this article we discuss some things it can be helpful with, it’s limitations, and some work arounds.

Minimum Paragraph Widths in Fluid Layouts

In fluid width environments, the text that wraps around floated elements can get awkwardly narrow and trap bits of text orphaned away from the rest of the paragraph. This article explains that problem in more details and offers a few solutions.

Places It’s Tempting To Use Display: None; But Don’t

Help yourself be better at accessibility by using better hiding techniques that don’t use display: none;. This involves some tricks like using more clever class names, being fancier with how you deal with JavaScript library animations, or avoiding hiding all together.

(Better) Tabs with Round Out Borders

A good-looking tab control usually has one feature that I’ve always found impossible to reproduce without images: borders that bend to the outside at the bottom of each tab. In this article I would like to show how you can use the CSS :before and:after pseudo elements to create this effect without using images.

Columns and the Greatest Common Divisor

I was recently putting together some CSS for columns. There was a few pre-determined widths that the columns needed to accommodate. For whatever reason (maybe because every grid framework in the world is this way) my mind went right to …

Full Browser Width Bars

Yet another useful thing that pseudo elements can do for us: allow us to create full browser width header bars without using internal non-semantic wrappers.

Case Study: jQuery Fixer Upper

We’ll look at some jQuery code that a CSS-Tricks reader posted in the forums. We’ll suggest ways to improve the code to make it more efficient and more extensible. We’ll also make some guesses about the HTML that it goes with and discuss improvements there.

Speed Up with CSS3 Gradients

This article was originally published on March 2, 2010. It is now updated to include the latest browser support and syntaxes.

July 20, 2011: Updating again for syntaxes…

Safari 4+, Chrome 1+, Firefox 3.6+, and Opera 11.10+ are all now …

Styling Texty Inputs Only

A CSS3 technique for selecting only texty inputs, without the burdon of listing every single attribute selector for every single new HTML5 input type. Plus alternates.

Keep Margins Out of Link Lists

When building a menu or other list of links, it’s generally a good practice to use display: block; or display: inline-block; so that you can increase the size of the link target. The simple truth: bigger link targets are easier …

Advanced Articles

Custom Events are Pretty Cool

Callbacks are one way to keep JavaScript functionalities cleanly separated, but they aren’t always enough. Using custom events are easier, more flexible, cleaner, and can make more obvious readable code.

Play Music on Your Site with the Grooveshark Streaming API

Grooveshark is a web app for listening to music. You can search for any play just about any song there is. With an account you favorite stuff, build playlists, do social stuff, you know the drill. Perhaps less known is …

Progressively Enhancing HTML5 Forms

This is what I’m thinking is the best current way to progressively enhance forms. That is, use HTML5 features when they are available and fall back to JavaScript alternatives when they are not. …

Animated Knockout Letters

I was watching some commercial the other day and they had these letters fly in over a black screen and reveal an image beneath them. It was a pretty cool looking effect and it reminded me how WebKit has that …

So You Need To Fill a Dropdown Dynamically

You have one dropdown menu, and depending on the user’s choice in that one, a second dropdown gets filled with choices. Let’s cover three different ways you can go about that.…

Parent Selectors in CSS

Let’s be clear here, just in case someone is finding this from a search engine: there are no parent selectors in CSS, not even in CSS3. It is an interesting topic to talk about though, and some fresh talk …

Fluid Width Equal Height Columns

Equal height columns have been a need of web designers forever. If all the columns share the same background, equal height is irrelevant because you can set that background on a parent element. But if one or more columns need …

Make a ‘View Source’ Button

Remy Sharp’s cool site for HTML5 demos has a “View Source” button on each of the individual demo pages. Click it, and you see the entire source code for the page you are looking at. It’s not a popup or …

Box Sizing

The “box model” in CSS works like this:

width + padding + border = actual visible/rendered width of box
height + padding + border = actual visible/rendered height of box

It’s a little weird, but you get used to it. …

Fix Inserted HTML5 Content with HTML5 innerShiv

When working with HTML5 today, many of you know that you’ll need to include the “HTML5 shiv” to ensure that CSS will recognize and be able to style those elements in browsers that aren’t yet hip to HTML5.

<!--[if IE]>

…

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