15 sites web developers and designers should know Creating a good website isn't an easy task, but there's a few tools that can definitely make your developer or designer life easier. In this article, I have compiled 15 extremely useful website that any web developer or web designer should have bookmarked. ColorCombos When designing a website, one of the firsts (and most important) steps of the process is to choose a color scheme. LIpsum Who doesn’t know the extremely popular Lorem Ipsum text? What the font? You just saw a logo or website using a particular font and you enjoyed it. ConvertIcon Favicons are a must have for any website, mostly because on modern browsers as such as Firefox, it is displayed along with the site name in tabs. BgPatterns background Patterns is definitely one of the current webdesign trends. HTML Encoder Do you display code on your website? Test Everything Sprite Generator CSS Sprites is definitely a great technique to use, mainly because it reduces the number of HTTP requests. Load Impact IconFinder TypeTester CSS Tidy
CSS tutorial Table of contents Introduction CSS is a formatting language, used to provide more customised web pages and make it easier to make multiple pages use the same style. The acronym stands for Cascading Style Sheets. All current browsers can handle CSS, and it is the best Web page formatting language produced to date. Some very popular browsers do not handle it as well as they should (see the section on browser problems) but largely support is good and developers are tending to use it much more often. Using CSS, you can define colours, backgrounds, borders, margins, alignment, fonts, sizes and loads of other things for almost any part of your web pages. The word cascading describes many of the features of CSS. Each element can be in a class. One of the features of CSS is that if the browser does not understand something, it will ignore it and move on to the next attribute. Opera has some of the most comprehensive CSS support of any browser. Adding CSS to a page Using comments Dealing with XHTML em
When to base64 encode images (and when not to) | David Calhoun's blog Introduction Ever since Steve Souders started evangelizing web performance, it’s been pounded into our heads that extra HTTP requests add a lot of additional overhead, and that we should combine them if possible to dramatically decrease the load time of our web pages. The practical implication of this has been to combine our JavaScript and CSS files, which is relatively easy and straightforward, but the harder question has been what to do with images. Sprites Image sprites are a concept taken from video games: the idea is to cram a ton of image assets into one file, and rearrange a “viewport” of sorts to view only specific pieces of that file at a time. On the web side of things, this means that those multiple requests have now been combined into one request. But there’s a few drawbacks with using image sprites: Data URIs and Base64 encoding Data URIs (see this, this, and this) and Base64 encoding goes hand-in-hand. Just like sprites, you save HTTP requests, but there’s also some drawbacks:
Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2 W3C Recommendation 12-May-1998 (revised 11 April 2008) This version: Latest version: Previous version: Editors: Bert Bos <bbos@w3.org>Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@w3.org>Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org> Note: This paragraph is informative. Abstract This specification defines Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 (CSS2). CSS2 builds on CSS1 (see [CSS1]) and, with very few exceptions, all valid CSS1 style sheets are valid CSS2 style sheets. Status of this document This document has been reviewed by W3C Members and other interested parties and has been endorsed by the Director as a W3C Recommendation. A list of current W3C Recommendations and other technical documents can be found at Public discussion of CSS features takes place on www-style@w3.org. Available formats The CSS2 specification is available in the following formats: a plain text file: and a PDF file:
10 Awesome Free Tools To Make Infographics Advertisement Who can resist a colourful, thoughtful venn diagram anyway? In terms of blogging success, infographics are far more likely to be shared than your average blog post. This means more eyeballs on your important information, more people rallying for your cause, more backlinks and more visits to your blog. Designing An Infographic Some great tips for designing infographics: Keep it simple! Ideas for infographic formats include: Timelines;Flow charts;Annotated maps;Graphs;Venn diagrams;Size comparisons;Showing familiar objects or similar size or value. Here are some great tutorials on infographic creation: Creating Your Infographic Plan and research.If required, use free software to create simple graphs and visualisations of data.Use vector graphic software to bring these visualisations into the one graphic. Ultimately, if you have a little design skill, the very best approach is to create all the simple graphs and illustrations yourself using vector graphic software. Stat Planet Hohli
RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters for Content Publishers and Webmasters This tutorial explains the features and benefits of a Web format called RSS, and gives a brief technical overview of it. It also includes information on a similar format called Atom. The reader is assumed to have some familiarity with XML and other Web technologies. It is not meant to be exhaustive; for more information, see the ‘More Information about RSS’ section. Introducing RSS Think about all of the information that you access on the Web on a day-to-day basis; news headlines, search results, “What’s New”, job vacancies, and so forth. Most people need to track a number of these lists, but it becomes difficult once there are more than a handful of sources. RSS is an XML-based format that allows the syndication of lists of hyperlinks, along with other information, or metadata, that helps viewers decide whether they want to follow the link. What’s in a feed? A feed contains a list of items or entries, each of which is identified by a link. No! <? <? Atom
CSS3 . Info - All you ever needed to know about CSS3 Meet the Pseudo Class Selectors Pseudo class selectors are CSS selectors with a colon preceding them. You are probably very familiar with a few of them. Like hover: a:hover { } They are immensely useful in a variety of situations. Link-related pseudo class selectors :link – Perhaps the most confusion-causing link-related pseudo selector. :visited – Selects links that have already been visited by the current browser. :hover – When the mouse cursor rolls over a link, that link is in it’s hover state and this will select it. :active – Selects the link while it is being activated (being clicked on or otherwise activated). There is a fun technique to remember all the link pseudo class selectors. Input & link related pseudo class selectors :focus – Defining hover styles for links is great, but it doesn’t help out those who used keyboard navigation to get to the link. :target – The target pseudo class is used in conjunction with IDs, and match when the hash tag in the current URL matches that ID. Relational pseudo class selectors
Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification Abstract This specification defines Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 revision 1 (CSS 2.1). CSS 2.1 is a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts and spacing) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). CSS 2.1 builds on CSS2 [CSS2] which builds on CSS1 [CSS1]. CSS 2.1 corrects a few errors in CSS2 (the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML's "style" attribute and a new calculation of the 'clip' property), and adds a few highly requested features which have already been widely implemented. CSS 2.1 is derived from and is intended to replace CSS2. Status of this document This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Publication as a Working Draft does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This document was produced by the CSS Working Group (part of the Style Activity). Candidate Recommendation Exit Criteria