Inside UI

50 CSS Tips & Tools for Webmasters

deepakgupta — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:44:57 +0000

The style of a website is defined by the CSS. CSS describes text fonts, if images must have borders or shadows, etc. Simply changing the CSS styles, you can change the appearance of your website completely, without changing the contents (text, images…).

For changing the CSS styles, there’s no need to be an expert webmaster, as there are tips and tools that can ease this task.

Here you are a list of the 50 most useful tips and tools for customizing your website easily with CSS.

Message boxes, You may have seen those color boxes with bright borders and icons inside in some websites, to highlight a note, warning or info. This post shows how to do it.

deepakgupta — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:27:59 +0000

Welcome To InsideUI.com

HTML 5.0 Canvas

deepakgupta — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:26:22 +0000

Introduction

The HTML 5 specification includes lots of new features, one of which is the canvas element. HTML 5 canvas gives you an easy and powerful way to draw graphics using JavaScript. For each canvas element you can use a “context” (think about a page in a drawing pad), into which you can issue JavaScript commands to draw anything you want. Browsers can implement multiple canvas contexts and the different APIs provide the drawing functionality.

Most of the major browsers include the 2D canvas context capabilities - Opera, Firefox, Konqueror and Safari.

The basics of using canvas

Creating a canvas context on your page is as simple as adding the

You need to define an element ID so you can find the element later in your JavaScript code, and you also need to define the width and height of the canvas.

That’s your drawing pad created, so now let’s put pen to paper. To draw inside your canvas you need to use JavaScript. First you find your canvas element using getElementById, then you initialize the context you want. Once you do that, you can start drawing into the canvas using the available commands in the context API. The following script (try running the example live) draws a simple rectangle into the canvas we defined above:

// Get a reference to the element.
var elem = document.getElementById(’myCanvas’);

// Always check for properties and methods, to make sure your code doesn’t break
// in other browsers.
if (elem && elem.getContext) {
// Get the 2d context.
// Remember: you can only initialize one context per element.
var context = elem.getContext(’2d’);
if (context) {
// You are done! Now you can draw your first rectangle.
// You only need to provide the (x,y) coordinates, followed by the width and
// height dimensions.
context.fillRect(0, 0, 150, 100);
}
}

You can choose to include this script inside the head of your document, or in an external file - it’s up to you.

Chrome Experiments

deepakgupta — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:39:58 +0000

Chrome Experiments were created by designers and programmers from around the world using the latest open standards, including HTML5, Canvas, SVG, and more. Their work is making the web faster, more fun, and more open. Visit some really cool stuffs:

Google Gravity

Browser Ball

Ball Pool

For more experiment, visit www.chromeexperiments.com

HTML 5.0

deepakgupta — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:56:16 +0000

Introduction

HTML 5 improves interoperability and reduces development costs by making precise rules on how to handle all HTML elements, and how to recover from errors.

Some of the new features in HTML 5 are functions for embedding audio, video, graphics, client-side data storage, and interactive documents. HTML 5 also contains new elements like

XHTML

deepakgupta — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:02:29 +0000

INTRODUCTION

XHTML is a stricter and cleaner version of HTML

What is XHTML

XHTML stands for EXtensible HyperText Markup Language
XHTML is almost identical to HTML 4.01
XHTML is a stricter and cleaner version of HTML
XHTML is HTML defined as an XML application
XHTML is a W3C Recommendation

SYNTAX

XHTML syntax rules

Attribute names must be in lower case
Attribute values must be quoted
Attribute minimization is forbidden
The id attribute replaces the name attribute
The XHTML DTD defines mandatory elements

Attribute Names Must Be In Lower Case

This is wrong:

This is correct:

Attribute Values Must Be Quoted

This is wrong:

This is correct:

Attribute Minimization Is Forbidden

This is wrong:

This is correct:

The “id” attribute replaces the name attribute

HTML 4.01 defines a name attribute for the elements applet, frame, iframe, and img. In XHTML the name attribute is deprecated. Use id instead.

This is wrong:

This is correct:

Note: To interoperate with older browsers for a while, you should use both name and id, with identical attribute values, like this:

IMPORTANT Compatibility Note:

To make your XHTML compatible with today’s browsers, you should add an extra space before the “/” symbol.

The Lang Attribute

The lang attribute applies to almost every XHTML element. It specifies the language of the content within an element.

If you use the lang attribute in an element, you must also add the xml:lang attribute, like this:

Heia Norge!

Mandatory XHTML Elements

All XHTML documents must have a DOCTYPE declaration. The html, head, title, and body elements must be present.

This is an XHTML document with a minimum of required tags:




Title goes here

For more details visit www.w3schools.com

CSS

admin — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 23:04:43 +0000

INTRODUCTION

What is CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
Styles define how to display HTML elements
Styles are normally stored in Style Sheets
Styles were added to HTML 4.0 to solve a problem
External Style Sheets can save you a lot of work
External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files
Multiple style definitions will cascade into one

Styles Solve a Common Problem

HTML tags were originally designed to define the content of a document. They were supposed to say “This is a header”, “This is a paragraph”, “This is a table”, by using tags like

,
,

, and so on. The layout of the document was supposed to be taken care of by the browser, without using any formatting tags.

As the two major browsers - Netscape and Internet Explorer - continued to add new HTML tags and attributes (like the tag and the color attribute) to the original HTML specification, it became more and more difficult to create Web sites where the content of HTML documents was clearly separated from the document’s presentation layout.

To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - the non profit, standard setting consortium, responsible for standardizing HTML - created STYLES in addition to HTML 4.0.

All major browsers support Cascading Style Sheets.

Style Sheets Can Save a Lot of Work

Styles sheets define HOW HTML elements are to be displayed, just like the font tag and the color attribute in HTML 3.2. Styles are normally saved in external .css files. External style sheets enable you to change the appearance and layout of all the pages in your Web, just by editing one single CSS document!

CSS is a breakthrough in Web design because it allows developers to control the style and layout of multiple Web pages all at once. As a Web developer you can define a style for each HTML element and apply it to as many Web pages as you want. To make a global change, simply change the style, and all elements in the Web are updated automatically.

Multiple Styles Will Cascade Into One

Style sheets allow style information to be specified in many ways. Styles can be specified inside a single HTML element, inside the element of an HTML page, or in an external CSS file. Even multiple external style sheets can be referenced inside a single HTML document.

Cascading Order

What style will be used when there is more than one style specified for an HTML element?

Generally speaking we can say that all the styles will “cascade” into a new “virtual” style sheet by the following rules, where number four has the highest priority:

Browser default

External style sheet

Internal style sheet (inside the tag)

Inline style (inside an HTML element)

So, an inline style (inside an HTML element) has the highest priority, which means that it will override a style declared inside the tag, in an external style sheet, or in a browser (a default value).

Note: If the external style sheet link is placed below the internal style sheet in HTML , the external style sheet will override the internal style sheet.

CSS Syntax

Syntax

The CSS syntax is made up of three parts: a selector, a property and a value:

selector {property: value}

The selector is normally the HTML element/tag you wish to define, the property is the attribute you wish to change, and each property can take a value. The property and value are separated by a colon, and surrounded by curly braces:

body {color: black}

Note: If the value is multiple words, put quotes around the value:

p {font-family: “sans serif”}

Note: If you wish to specify more than one property, you must separate each property with a semicolon. The example below shows how to define a center aligned paragraph, with a red text color:

p {text-align:center;color:red}

To make the style definitions more readable, you can describe one property on each line, like this:

p
{
	text-align: center;
	color: black;
	font-family: arial
}

Grouping

You can group selectors. Separate each selector with a comma. In the example below we have grouped all the header elements. All header elements will be displayed in green text color:

h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6
{
	color: green
}

The class Selector

With the class selector you can define different styles for the same type of HTML element.

Say that you would like to have two types of paragraphs in your document: one right-aligned paragraph, and one center-aligned paragraph. Here is how you can do it with styles:

p.right {text-align: right}
p.center {text-align: center}

You have to use the class attribute in your HTML document:

This paragraph will be right-aligned.

This paragraph will be center-aligned.

Note: To apply more than one class per given element, the syntax is:

This paragraph will be right-aligned.

The paragraph above will be styled by the class “center” AND the class “bold”.

You can also omit the tag name in the selector to define a style that will be used by all HTML elements that have a certain class. In the example below, all HTML elements with class=”center” will be center-aligned:

.center {text-align: center}

Add Styles to Elements with Particular Attributes

You can also apply styles to HTML elements with particular attributes.

The style rule below will match all input elements that have a type attribute with a value of “text”:

input[type="text"] {background-color: blue}

The id Selector

You can also define styles for HTML elements with the id selector. The id selector is defined as a #.

The style rule below will match the element that has an id attribute with a value of “green”:

#green {color: green}

The style rule below will match the p element that has an id with a value of “para1″:

p#para1
{
	text-align: center;
	color: red
}

CSS Comments

Comments are used to explain your code, and may help you when you edit the source code at a later date. A comment will be ignored by browsers. A CSS comment begins with “/*”, and ends with “*/”, like this:

/* This is a comment */
p
{
	text-align: center;
	/* This is another comment */
	color: black;
	font-family: arial
}

For more details visit www.w3schools.com