Don’t use IDs in CSS selectors? ❧ Oli.jp (@boblet) Recently I came across the post by Matt Wilcox called CSS Lint is harmful, ranting about the useful free tool CSS Lint. The “Don’t use IDs in selectors” suggestion seems to have offended Matt the most, but I was surprised that many commenters also mentioned this as being a reason to avoid CSS Lint. This surprised me because smart people have been saying prefer classes to IDs for a while now. Performance — IDs are “the fastest way a browser can select a given element”If they’re already in the markup it’s best to use them for CSSI’ve been using IDs like forever… waddya mean I shouldn’t use them!? Performance # It’s a common belief that ID selectors are the fastest, but this comes with a big caveat: IDs are fastest CSS selector only if they’re the key selector. #home a {…} We’d generally read this selector as find the element with id="home", then apply these styles to every a it contains. As you’ve deduced, the key selector is the right-most one (a in #home a {…}). IDs are brittle #
Force Element To Self-Clear its Children Share this: Ship custom analytics today with Keen.io. This will do you fine these days (IE 8 and up): Apply it to any parent element in which you need to clear the floats. You would use this instead of clearing the float with something like <br style="clear: both;" /> at the bottom of the parent (easy to forget, not handleable right in CSS, non-semantic) or using something like overflow: hidden; on the parent (you don't always want to hide overflow). Now for a bit of history! This was the original popular version, designed to support browsers as far back as it possibly could: There then was a bit of a cleaner version documented here by Jeff Starr, based on the fact that nobody uses IE for Mac, which is what the backslash hack was all about. Then it became popular to use "group" as a class name, which is nicer and more semantic (via Dan Cederholm). Of course, if you drop IE 6 or 7 support, remove the associated lines. Update May 18, 2011: Nicolas Gallagher again with the "micro" clearfix.
Stop Making Sprites (Compass, Sass, and PNG Sprite Generation) | Viget Inspire Update 01/11/12: new code at the bottom of this post. Sass has been kicking around for a while, but I hadn’t given it a try until just recently. Sass usually goes hand-in-hand with Rails, Compass makes it so easy to run Sass on standalone projects that I’ve started using it on nearly everything. The result is faster, DRYer, more enjoyable coding. The biggest benefit for me has been Compass’s sprite generation, which — if done right — can cut down your coding time and filesize. Sprites are an optimization best practice, but they’re no fun to work with. It also does things the Rails way, in that it provides conventions to follow rather than configuration to specify. Folder Structure This is how I’m laying out the example project: I like to separate any compile-to stuff from the actual final output — hence “compile” and “assets”. Sass allows you to break CSS up and @import it into a single file at compile time, and I tend to go crazy with this feature. compass watch compile/sass/all.scss
clearfix Reloaded + overflow:hidden Demystified clearfix and overflow:hidden may be the two most popular techniques to clear floats without structural markup. This short article is about enhancing the first method and shedding some light on the real meaning of the second. clearfix In everything you know about clearfix is wrong I explain the issues this method creates across browsers and I suggest to only use clearfix on elements that are not next to floats (e.g. a modal window), although as authors we still have to deal with collapsing margins. Margin-collapse behavior in the first two boxes shows that it is the generated (non-empty) content that keeps the bottom margin inside the box (which makes perfect sense according to spec). So, to create the same box layout across browsers we can enhance the original method by generating content using both pseudo-elements :before and :after: overflow 10.1 Definition of "containing block": 4. You can check this demo page to see how things work. Better alternatives Further reading
CSS3 Solutions for Internet Explorer - Smashing Magazine Advertisement Experienced developers understand that CSS3 can be added to new projects with progressive enhancement in mind. This ensures that content is accessible while non-supportive browsers fall back to a less-enhanced experience for the user. But developers could face a situation where a client insists that the enhancements work cross-browser, demanding support even for IE6. In that case, I’ve collected together a number of options that developers can consider for those circumstances where support for a CSS3 feature is required for all versions of Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, & IE8 — all of which are still currently in significant use). Opacity / Transparency I think all developers are baffled at why Internet Explorer still fails to support this very popular (albeit troublesome) property. The Syntax You really only need the second line, which works in all versions of Internet Explorer. The Demonstration This is the same element without the opacity settings. The Drawbacks Box Shadow
HasLayout et bugs de rendu dans Internet Explorer 6-7 Le HasLayout, dont vous avez sans doute entendu parler au détour d'un tutoriel ou sur un forum, est une spécificité du navigateur Internet Explorer pour Windows, qui affecte les versions 5 à 7 incluses. Il s'agit d'un mécanisme interne du moteur de rendu d'Internet Explorer. Le HasLayout intervient dans le positionnement des éléments et plus généralement dans le calcul de l'affichage des pages web. Bref, c'est une question de cuisine interne. Concrètement, qu'est-ce-que c'est? Les explications détaillées sur le HasLayout peuvent être trouvées dans l'article On Having Layout. On retiendra surtout que, pour Internet Explorer, tout élément d'une page HTML peut avoir deux états: soit il a le layout, soit il ne l'a pas. Mais qui a le layout? Un exemple de différence de rendu lié au layout Par défaut, les éléments flottants «dépassent» de leurs blocs parents. <p style="border: solid 2px red;"> Ce paragraphe n'a pas le "layout". On pourrait multiplier les exemples. Conférer le layout à un élément
An Introduction To LESS, And Comparison To Sass - Smashing Magazine Advertisement I’ve been using LESS1 religiously ever since I stumbled upon it months ago. CSS was never really a problem for me, in and of itself, but I was intrigued by the idea of using variables to create something along the lines of a color palette for my websites and themes. As it turns out, LESS — and Sass for that matter — are so much more than that. Mixins – Classes for classes.Parametric mixins – Classes to which you can pass parameters, like functions.Nested Rules – Classes within classes, which cut down on repetitive code.Operations – Math within CSS.Color functions – Edit your colors.Namespaces – Groups of styles that can be called by references.Scope – Make local changes to styles.JavaScript evaluation – JavaScript expressions evaluated in CSS. The main difference between LESS and Sass is the way in which they are processed. Sass, on the other hand, runs on Ruby and is processed server-side. LESS Is More Installation Note the rel attribute of the link. Variables Mixins Scope (al)
width: 100%, tu es le Mal ! – La Tête dans le Flux La propriété CSS width est certainement celle qui porte le plus mal son nom. En effet, elle représente la taille de la composante de contenu uniquement, pas largeur de l’élément. A vrai dire, l’appellation content-width lui conviendrait parfaitement et serait bien moins source de problèmes, mais voilà, elle s’appelle bel et bien width, et c’est ça le drame. Il est dangereux de croire que width correspond à la largeur de l’élément puisque dès que des marges internes (paddings) ou bordures (border) y sont ajoutées, la taille totale de l’élément ne correspond plus du tout à width. Et c’est d’autant plus problématique que l’on voit pulluler partout des width: 100%… ce qui crée potentiellement des éléments qui déborderont joyeusement de leur parent dès lors que le moindre padding ou la moindre bordure seront appliqués. C’est tout. Dans la grande majorité des cas, on peut aisément se passer de width: 100% Vos éléments sont des blocks (div, p, h1, ul, etc.) ?
FIXED! font-face rendering incorrectly in Chrome For a while now web designers have been tackling the issue of fonts on the web. Times have now changed from the days of designing strictly in web-safe fonts (Arial, Tahoma, Georgia etc.) to using JavaScript (Cufon) to render more fancy fonts. With a huge wealth of fonts (both paid and free) now readily available online to designers, rendering fonts online has become more of an issue. Sure, your website may look great in Photoshop, but how are you going to emulate that intricate font across multiple browsers? There are a variety of font services out there: fonts.com and Google fonts are the big players; however we decided to go down the route of @font-face, as we have a large collection of bought fonts already that we could utilise through @font-face. Skip To The Fix! font-face @font-face is a CSS rule which allows you to download a particular font from your server to render on a webpage if the user hasn’t got that specific font installed. font-face vs Chrome The FIX! Try It Yourself .
Le point sur les grilles en CSS – La Tête dans le Flux Les grilles en CSS font souvent office de Saint Graal dans nos maquettes : toujours imitées, jamais égalées. Ou énoncé différemment : des fois ça marche, des fois ça marche pas. EDIT : à l’aube de 2016, cet article bénéficie d’une suite dans cette réflexion : « Grid Layout, vers la grille parfaite ». De très nombreux frameworks CSS proposent des solutions de grilles toutes plus sexy les unes que les autres, mais ont immanquablement recours à des hacks et des bidouilles multiples pour couvrir tous les cas de figure et bugs navigateurs. Tout simplement parce qu’en 2014, en 18 ans de CSS, il n’existe toujours pas de modèle de positionnement idéal pour la conception de grilles de mise en page. Faisons le point sur les solutions existantes, leurs avantages et limites, ainsi que sur les modules de positionnements que l’avenir nous réserve… The Grid ? Avant de choisir ou tenter de concevoir une grille CSS de mise en page, les critères suivants doivent être considérés : Gouttière ou pas gouttière ?
The @Font-Face Rule And Useful Web Font Tricks Advertisement The possibility of embedding any font you like into websites via @font-face is an additional stylistic device which promises to abolish the monotony of the usual system fonts. It surely would be all too easy if there was only one Web font format out there. This quick introduction to @font-face will lead you towards a guide through the @font-face kit generator. Web Font Formats EOT, TTF, OTF, CFF, AFM, LWFN, FFIL, FON, PFM, PFB, WOFF, SVG, STD, PRO, XSF, and the list goes on. TrueType This format was developed in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe’s Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. OpenType Microsoft and Adobe teamed up in developing this font format. OpenType fonts with TrueType Outlines (OpenType TT) and OpenType fonts with PostScript Outlines (OpenType PS) 1OpenType comes in two different versions. OpenType PS is a so-called CFF based file format (CFF = compact file format). EOT is exclusively supported by Internet Explorer. @font-face Revolution Font Formats Subsetting
Ce bon vieux tableau HTML – La Tête dans le Flux Hier, sur Twitter, j’ai conseillé d’utiliser des tableaux HTML pour de la mise en forme. Et je n’ai même pas honte. En 2011 déjà, lors d’un atelier Paris-Web, je vantais les mérites des tableaux HTML pour de l’habillage graphique. Au cours de cette présentation, je revenais point par point sur chacun des arguments anti-tableaux : Bref, l’idée globale de ma présentation était à cette époque de revenir sur le classique « les tableaux HTML, c’est le Mal absolu », tellement ancré dans nos esprits que l’on ne se pose même plus de questions. En 2015, avec toutes les techniques de positionnement actuels (inline-block, table-cell, flexbox, etc.), et avec tout le mal qu’on a pu dire des tableaux HTML, comment est-il encore possible que j’en parvienne à conseiller son usage ? Tout simplement parce que l’on m’a demandé comment réaliser ce type de gabarit, a priori très simple : Selon moi, le meilleur choix, aujourd’hui, est le tableau HTML. <table role="presentation"><!