Latest Edited: 06/02/12

Subtle Backgrounds – Really nice subtle background images you can you use for your next project.

CSS3 Button Generator – For us lazy types who like GUIs for doing this sort of thing!

Vendor prefixes in CSS serve the purpose of allowing browsers to play about with their own implementations of new CSS rules or adding stuff totally unique to them.

There have been arguments back and forward about how useful these are in production systems and there have been some great tools made to try and reduce how much time we spend in vendor prefix hell, personally I think anything that drives the web forward is a good thing and I think prefixes do that.  But anyway, enough pre-able.

What I would like to propose is that since we have vendor prefixes anyway, could we use them to target specific browsers with already known rules.

I have an edge case where it would be really nice to be able to do something like;

margin-bottom: 59px;
-webkit-margin-bottom: 39px;

What this would allow me to do is set the standard margin-bottom to 59px (if it not being 60px makes you twitch, join the club!) but in webkit browsers I would like the margin to be slightly smaller.

I know this could be misused and end in really sloppy, massive CSS files – but if used with care (which I promise I would do) it would be a neat way to achieve these odd little hacks that occasionally we need to do.

You can read the full question and answer on the site, but essentially I needed to add;

* { overflow:visible ! important; }

into my stylesheet.

The issue, of course, was that my stylesheet wasn’t designed to hide the style of the unordered list items.  Here is the code I needed to add to remove the bullets.

#disqus_thread ul {
    list-style: none outside none;
}

Hope it helps someone.

An example of this would be when you have a td with a CSS property of width: 100px; and apply a colspan of say 3.

What most browsers seem to do is take that width and multiply it by the colspan, whilst this is sometimes useful it isn’t what you asked the browser to do.

IE7 doesn’t assume anything, it applies the colspan first then looks at the CSS and says ‘hold on a minute, they want this width set to 100px’ and applies it.

In my opinion that is the way it should work and well done IE7 for not trying to second guess me.

I found this when I was doing a quick search for new CSS themed Firefox plugins and whilst I was initially put off by the fact I had to install Adobe Air on my lovely new machine and the fact I had to sign up to a website in order to use this service I decided to give it a whirl.  After doing those things the process of using it was fairly straight forward.

You download and install the Air application, put in your key (which you can get from the website by clicking on your username once logged in), drag your local CSS file into the Air application and there you go, set up and ready to sync.

Once you have made your edit in Firebug you can sync either from the Firebug console itself, or from the Air application.

To sum up this very quick post I think my initial thoughts on this small app are very promising ones.  Get over the fact you need to sign up in order to use it and you will very quickly find yourself saving a lot of time copying and pasting small code changes.

The creators seem very keen to receive feedback and hopefully this app will continue to improve with each release.

So today I want to chat about the SM post entitled ‘50 New CSS Techniques For Your Next Web Design‘ it is a quality article (what else would you expect from Smashing Magazine) that basically runs down a list of blog posts and tutorials on how to achieve the very latest CSS things.  As with a lot of their articles you could always argue that this is all information that is freely available and perhaps that most web designers should already be taking for granted but the fact of the matter is that with so much new stuff constantly coming out, and so many people finding new ways of doing things these run downs are incredibly useful.

Things that I found especially interesting / useful were;

• Compressing JavaScript and CSS.
• Useful layout tips and tricks.
• Multiple Backgrounds.
• A whole lot more.

I would really suggest you bookmark this article and really spend time going through each of the sections.