tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91986712009-07-10T09:25:50.962-04:00The Philadelphia Area Computer Society CSS Workshop started with the basics of cascading style sheets and will continue as long as there is interest and we have something new to learn.John Daveynoreply@blogger.comBlogger152125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-702344987621022402009-07-09T20:39:00.002-04:002009-07-09T20:53:16.230-04:00

The Line 25 website has a nice run-down of articles from various sources entitled 15 Must Read Articles for CSS Beginners. We have covered most of the subjects at our workshop, and others will be covered next season.Don't be fooled by "Beginners" in the title. These articles might be introductory, but some of the subjects are fairly advanced. And you might find that the locations of these

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-65623047207766613102009-07-04T12:56:00.002-04:002009-07-04T13:01:59.364-04:00

ViewLike.us is a new website that lets you check how your website looks in different resolutions. Checking different resolutions is obviously a good idea, but it is not always easy without a bunch of computers. This site might be a solution. It even includes iPhone and Wii Browswer.If you try it, leave a comment here about how the site worked for you.

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-18977366884648704252009-06-21T15:51:00.006-04:002009-06-21T22:13:50.893-04:00

At our June meeting, we discussed the elements of navigation menus and then saw how those elements worked on some sample menus.We first considered the HTML foundation for a menu. Looking at a couple of major sites, we saw that the unordered list seems to be the most accepted format, but a simple sentence list is often used for secondary menus, like footers. Compare the White House site with the

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-37821760468174641972009-06-18T21:34:00.000-04:002009-06-18T21:35:07.503-04:00

The next meeting of the PACS CSS Workshop will be this Saturday, June 20, at 9 to 10 am. At this session, we will bring together the different elements of navigation styling that we have discussed this season. We will sum up where we have been, and then show how to use CSS to make navigation menus that are attractive as well as functional. Along the way, we will raise another of our web design

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-38652616417574327432009-05-21T21:48:00.002-04:002009-05-21T21:57:20.582-04:00

At our May meeting, we returned to the topic of styling navigation menus, a topic we have been covering throughout this year.This month we looked at the CSS properties that I think are keys to creating attractive menus. Those properties includepseudo-selectors, using the LoVeHA order;display:, both block and inline-block, the latter being increasingly supported by browsers;list-style,

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-89218658311684664582009-05-14T21:05:00.001-04:002009-05-14T21:05:59.614-04:00

The next session of the PACS CSS Workshop will be held this Saturday, May 16, at the usual 9 - 10 am hour.We will get back to the subject of navigation menus by looking at the building blocks of good navigation styling and considering some issues that come up in designing a navigation system.We will also cover a couple of other topics of interest related to web design, as well as anything else

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-81428084432594507472009-04-30T22:37:00.002-04:002009-04-30T22:41:36.291-04:00

Since we have been talking about CSS navigation this year, I think this article from Six Revisions will be of interest. Many of the examples are from websites where you can find even more ideas. We'll see if we can work through some of these approaches to navigation in coming meetings.

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-19953892559690786532009-04-18T20:51:00.002-04:002009-04-18T21:10:23.616-04:00

At our April meeting, we started by looking at a page from CSS Tricks on the different options for setting type size in CSS. There are some nice visuals there to illustrate the different units of measure. For another article on fonts from a different perspective, check out Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will.We then returned to looking at Internet Explorer 8, which will

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-85752546630858713632009-04-16T23:28:00.000-04:002009-04-16T23:29:34.517-04:00

The next session of the PACS CSS Workshop will be held this Saturday, April 18, at our usual 9 - 10 hour.We have been working this year on styling links and creating navigation menus with CSS. Last month, we took a side trip to look at the new Internet Explorer 8 and its claim of full support for current CSS standards. We had a few leftover topics to look at regarding IE8, and this month, we will

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-21389432402524979202009-03-22T13:03:00.001-04:002009-03-22T13:18:51.489-04:00

At our March meeting, we first looked at an online site for creating CSS declarations. The site lets you use drop down menus for various properties and then copy and paste into the head of a webpage. The site is CSS Mate. There are other sites out there that do the same thing -- just do a search.We also looked at a couple of sites that create color palettes. One was Color Blender. You can also

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-45577241488210503192009-03-19T21:58:00.002-04:002009-03-19T22:02:12.471-04:00

The next session of the PACS CSS Workshop will be this Saturday at 9 - 10 am. We will continue on the subject of styling menus, but I hope to take a slight detour as well. I just downloaded Internet Explorer 8, which was released today, and I hope to be able to show what might be new in IE8 as far as CSS support. For those interested, the download page is at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-81403654245502240602009-02-22T10:30:00.004-05:002009-02-22T10:55:48.086-05:00

At our February meeting, we took pseudo-class selectors to a new level by employing combined declarations and by using classes.A combined selector looks like this -- a:hover:visited. It would define the hover style of a link after it has been visited.So in the below example, the link hover will be overlined when not visited, but underlined after being visited:a:hover {color:red; text-decoration:

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-22246490788494130652009-02-16T19:30:00.001-05:002009-02-16T19:34:00.478-05:00

The next meeting of the PACS CSS Workshop will be this Saturday, February 21, at the usual 9 - 10 hour.We will continue on the subject of styling links, with the goal of developing interesting navigation menus. We worked last month with the pseudo-classes that can be used with the anchor tag, emphasizing the correct order to be used in order for the links to be styled properly.This month, we

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-83715549706409145542009-01-18T11:34:00.002-05:002009-01-18T11:43:46.717-05:00

The January meeting was about using CSS to style links. We started with the HTML attributes for the body tag that allow you to set the colors of a link when it is unvisited, active, and visited. Of course, CSS gives you that and more, so we moved on to using CSS to style links.First, we saw that the anchor tag can be styled the same way as any selector, but the result does not differentiate

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-25192795741705434002009-01-15T23:12:00.002-05:002009-01-15T23:24:57.485-05:00

The next session of the PACS CSS Workshop will be Saturday, January 17, at our usual 9 - 10 hour.We will continue our review of styling the anchor tag, so as to create interesting navigation menus with CSS. We talked about the HTML of links last month. This month, we will get into adding style to those links and discuss the concept of the pseudo-class.Along the way we will also consider LoVe, HA!

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-41496966760464300392009-01-15T22:57:00.003-05:002009-01-15T23:12:09.843-05:00

At the December meeting, we went through the basics of the HTML anchor tag. We talked about some of the attributes of the tag, like title and target. We spent some time discussing how to style the title of an anchor, using an example from the Code: qTip website. We also discussed linking to named anchors within a page and to named anchors within another page.As an example of how creative one can

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-19138920769995058902008-12-14T17:12:00.002-05:002008-12-14T17:17:03.353-05:00

The next session of the PACS CSS Workshop will be Saturday, December 20, at our usual 9 - 10 hour.My thanks to Reed Gustow for handling last month's meeting. This month we will jump back to the topic that we started in October, using CSS to create navigation menus. In October, we talked a little bit about philosophies of navigation and interfaces in general. On that topic, members might be

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-18210508788835593392008-11-22T14:28:00.002-05:002008-11-22T14:37:57.133-05:00

The November meeting was organized and conducted by Reed Gustow. The topic was multi-column layouts with CSS. The techniques can get tricky, particularly if you want the columns to be of equal height.Reed demonstrated some techniques found on A List Apart, a fantastic resource for web designers. Reed provided his notes and samples, and they can be downloaded by clicking here and saving this file,

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-80697910876150666352008-11-19T18:16:00.004-05:002008-11-19T18:28:54.625-05:00

For a limited time, Sitepoint is giving away for download a free copy of The Art & Science of CSS. We have used this book to organize a few meetings over the past couple of years. It is an intermediate level work that covers specific aspects of a web page and shows how to style each in different ways.Sitepoint actually calls this a Twitaway, i.e., a Twitter giveaway, but it is not necessary to

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-50136959787804894112008-11-13T22:22:00.001-05:002008-11-13T22:23:21.845-05:00

The next meeting of the PACS CSS Workshop will be this Saturday, November 15, at 9 - 10 am. I will be out of town, and Reed Gustow has graciously volunteered to cover this month's session. Reed will cover multi-column layouts, emphasizing some good techniques for making equal-height columns, something that can be very tricky. It is an important topic for developing professional looking webpages

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-23401262075200198372008-11-13T21:26:00.003-05:002008-11-13T21:40:23.638-05:00

Reed Gustow, who was good enough to cover the September meeting of the CSS Workshop, sent me the examples he used for that meeting. The topic for September was advanced layout techniques, and Reed demonstrated a 3-column page format using CSS. I have uploaded a zipped folder of the examples for those who want to review their notes. Click and save this file, and extract it to retrieve the files.

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-21951392193076336962008-10-19T08:58:00.002-04:002008-10-19T09:37:26.980-04:00

At our October meeting, we began a series of presentations on styling the navigation menu of a website. Navigation can help give a site a distinctive look, one that carries over throughout the site. We discussed some of the design objectives of a navigation scheme and how the design can help or hinder the site's usebility and accessibility.We looked at a few examples of navigation schemes using

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-15445246017099762902008-10-17T00:29:00.000-04:002008-10-17T00:30:27.729-04:00

The next session of the PACS CSS Workshop will be held this Saturday, October 18, from 9 to 10 am in the Alps Room at the Giant Foods community center.We will be starting a series of meetings on navigation. It is a topic that Web Design has covered, but as is our usual practice, we will look at the basics of styling navigation links to understand the foundations better. With that goal in mind,

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-31615157116185196732008-09-12T20:32:00.002-04:002008-09-12T20:35:15.942-04:00

The first session of the CSS Workshop for this year will be held on September 20. It will be at the usual 9 - 10 am time slot, but at our new location. By now you should have received a mailing from PACS to confirm that PACS is moving to the Giant Foods Community Center located on the upper floor of the store at 315 York Road, Willow Grove, PA. This location will be more convenient to get to, and

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9198671.post-13753570090020545102008-06-25T21:33:00.002-04:002008-06-25T21:36:09.179-04:00

At our June meeting, we talked about the "cascade" in cascading style sheets. We looked at the different ways of applying styles to a page and how the cascade determines which of conflicting styles is applied to an element.We reviewed browser default styles and how a user can change those default settings. We then looked at inline, embedded, linked, and imported styles. Where styles conflict, the

John Daveynoreply@blogger.com0