Beautiful CSS site

Member 96

I am in the process of learning how to use Cascading Style Sheets and came across this very cool site which shows what is possible with css. The site consists of a standard page that is modified through css provided by graphic artists, only the css can be changed, the html is left untouched. http://www.csszengarden.com[^]

brianwelsch

Cool, thanks! :)

let the whole world look in
who cares who sees anything

BW

P

Hey, thats a real nice site... If your into CSS as I am, you may find using a CSS editor quicker and more productive The most famous is TopStlye, which you can download a trial version from here.. if you like it buy it... :) http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/download/index.asp If you want you can also download a Lite Vesion which still gives you most of the important and most unique functionalities of TopStyle that sets it from the rest. You can download it here: http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/download/litedload.asp Hope this serves you well... Cheers P@ :-D

Member 96

Cool! Thanks for the link, that does look like a step up from using Visual Studio! Budget precludes right now, but it's on my to do list. I'm just an absolute beginner with CSS, but I already know enough to never use a font tag in my html documents again! I'm working on improving an app that my company publishes which is a web interface to a business application that we also publish. The web interface is actually a stand alone purpose built lightweight web server that we developed, it serves up static html pages with a database backend and business logic. Problem is that people don't like how plainly we designed the html pages and always want to modify them. We can't allow modification of the html itself for security and other reasons so I went on a hunt to find out how to allow that and CSS works perfectly, they can modify the look and feel without changing the content. I had to recode the server to recognize CSS content type etc, but now it works perfectly so I'm just trying to develop some sample CSS pages to post on our site and distribute with the update that supports it. One thing that I'm trying to decide is whether to provide support for alternate .css for mobile web browsers. It's like pulling teeth to find out anything about what they support or don't support for css. I'm thinking of leaving it out for now, but there could be tremendous benefits as well. Oh well, back to work. Thanks again for the tip.

Chris LaQuerre

Wow, I have been using CSS formatting for years and have considered myself to be pretty proficient in developing pages with it... until now. After viewing this site, I realize that it is capable of so much more. I was impressed to see that the page was actually written in XHTML which shows that you can write proper code and have a visually stunning site (developers and graphic artists can co-exist). The author actually took the time to add the following comment in the code regarding the choice to use XHTML. Chris LaQuerre eBusiness Consultant

J Dunlap

That's why I always use CSS rather than <font> and various attributes, and why all the ASP.NET controls I make are completely CSS skinnable. Some tips: try to use external CSS files rather than page styles or inline styles. They only have to be downloaded once, rather than separately for each page, and they are easier to change later.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." - Jesus
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi

Jack Puppy

I use CSS for both my web site and my HTML help files. Makes things easy if you decide to change the design at a later time. w3schools has a nice article on CSS: http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

My 20 favorite films:
http://www.ymdb.com/user_top20_view.asp?usersid=8912

P

Not a problem John... Yup, on a complex, detailed site font tags can be a hazard when it comes to coding the text let alone updating it! CSS is definitely the way to go if you want to create rich content and have good control of it at the same time. jdunlap's comments are well founded. When writing Inline or Internal(global) CSS', you will still have to edit the actual HTML page to make any changes - External style sheets are far more easier to deal with, because of this reason alone. Jumping on jdunlap's band wagon here's another tip to note: CSS has a funny little thing that it does (Inheritance) - a child tag will inherit the parent tags attributes if not specified as the CSS section is read from top down > hence the word CASCADING - Here's what I mean... \\this is your "p" element style in your HTML's "head" section\\ **p font-family:verdana; font-weight:bold; color:red;}** \\If I was to now write a paragraph of text and have an "em" tag in there some where, wanting to make a portion of the text italic, it (the text in between the "em" tags) would inherit all the pre-set attributes in the "p" element I first stated and would look italicized yet, in **Arial** font, **bold** and **Red** in colour - So you would need to create a "class" for your "em" element, to override the inheritance of the parent tag. This may not be an issue for you if your page doesn't have multiple styles in different portions of the page\\ Well, I don't know if that made sense but if you need to know more on that, I'd be happy to elaborate further. Oh and another good thing about CSS, it only works with open and closing tags on HTML elements... this ties in perfectly with the XHTML concept and XML too.. :-D P.S - Here's a link with information on CSS for mobile devices - may help you in your investigations. http://www.w3.org/TR/css-mobile Best of luck... Pat