Site Styling with CSS

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Site Styling with CSS

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jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28118
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Wed Aug 17, 05 8:39 am Post subject: Site Styling with CSS

This could be a laugh, this site relies heavily on CSS for its looks. So far I have always muddled though with CSS, pretty much hitting on it, until something bends into shape, but with only a limited understanding as to the hows and whys of it.

Today I have just received to O'Reiily books on CSS, which I'm planning to plow through today in order to discover how much of a mess I have made of things

Any other web designers out there, who will admit to this failing? My excuse is that I never intended to do web design

joanne

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 7100
Location: Morecambe, Lancashire

Posted: Wed Aug 17, 05 9:47 am Post subject:

Here Here (*hands up in air!!) - I hate CSS with a passion and only really use it to do basic stuff

I know its really powerful and you can do some fantastic stuff with it - tables are supposed to be soooo passe with CSS and I've got the books all about but still I resist

Infact I'm fighting with CSS at this very moment - can't work out why my stylesheet is drawing lines round tables - I don't want it to

Joanne

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28118
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Wed Aug 17, 05 10:07 am Post subject:

I have a feeling that after reading the books I will be a convert.

There are basically A LOT of rules on precedence etc that control what style actually applies. Until you really manage to get your head around these rules, you will struggle as I do badly. But I think once you are at one with the rules, it will all come together and be blindingly useful

at least that's my feeling with a little bit of book1 read.

dougal

Joined: 15 Jan 2005
Posts: 7184
Location: South Kent

Posted: Wed Aug 17, 05 10:54 am Post subject:
My name is dougal and I have avoided CSS 'cos I don't have much of a clue as to what is really going on. Here endeth the confession.

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28118
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Wed Aug 17, 05 11:02 am Post subject:
Well I am very pleased to hear the other "confessions" I was wondering whether i'd be in disgrace as a bumbling amatuer

bagpuss

Joined: 09 Dec 2004
Posts: 10507
Location: cambridge

Posted: Wed Aug 17, 05 11:11 am Post subject:
In the dim and distant past when I had a set of webpages and wanted to maintain a consistent style which wasn't time new roman I used CSS this though was 4 years ago so I suspect things have moved on since then They seemed pretty useful though

barefoot_boo

Joined: 06 Aug 2005
Posts: 399
Location: Wiltshire

Posted: Wed Aug 17, 05 11:11 am Post subject:

Have a look at: https://www.csszengarden.com/ which shows just how wonderful css can be when implimented correctly. Its also a good way to have a play around and get a feel for css (you probably already know about it, but thought it was worth a mention). It also worth having a look at my friends site here ( https://www.kevinleitch.co.uk/projectnew/index.php ), as kev is a bit of a CSS guru and has a real bee in his bonnet about site accessibility (quite rightly imo).

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28118
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Wed Aug 17, 05 12:51 pm Post subject:
Well making progress, some lists on the site are now more consistant and what is more I think I fully understood what I was doing!

mpw

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 21

Posted: Fri Aug 19, 05 9:36 am Post subject:

Stick with it , Jema. CSS will do your head in to begin with and it can feel like you have to learn a new way of thinking, but the rewards are worth it.

The main drawback with using CSS at the moment is that most people - poor misguided fools that they are - are still using M$ Internet Destroyer to look at the web. It's a big pile of poo, in my humble opinion, and anyone who produces websites with CSS will know how many hacks are required to get it to render even the simple stuff correctly. Like having a page centred horizontally in the viewport. D'uh!

FireFox is vastly superior, it's fast, very user friendly and it renders CSS brilliantly.

I don't know which books you have, but Zeldman's "Designing with Web Standards" is hard to beat. Eric Meyer has a lot of specific "how-to's" in his books, "The Zen of CSS Design", with examples from the website, is inspirational and "HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables" is also well worth a read.

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28118
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Fri Aug 19, 05 9:50 am Post subject:
I did stick with it and yesterday recoded the key 4 custom modules I created for this site, with a far clearer eye on what CSS is all about. The result was some leaner modules with virtually no hardcoded stying and with less CSS classes involved. They also pass XHTML compliance. The end result does not look any different but that is not the point.

dougal

Joined: 15 Jan 2005
Posts: 7184
Location: South Kent

Posted: Fri Aug 19, 05 10:15 am Post subject:

mpw wrote:

...I don't know which books you have...

Jema - you didn't say *which* O'Reilly books on CSS you have found so immediately helpful ...

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28118
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Fri Aug 19, 05 10:25 am Post subject:

dougal wrote:

mpw wrote:

...I don't know which books you have...

Jema - you didn't say *which* O'Reilly books on CSS you have found so immediately helpful ...

Cascading Style Sheets - The definitive Guide

and

CSS cookbook

I am a very big fan of O'Reilly guides. You can get a lot of very very thick guides to I.T. things that consist of little more than revamped manual pages, screenshots and other useless padding.

These book could do with rectify some ommissions, but has a dense level of information, as opposed information for the dense.

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