Responsive Web Design Techniques, Tools and Design Strategies

A good introduction to css box model and suitable hacks

A useful introduction to an advanced way to use text in menus and other website GUIs

A website colour scheme a day!

useful javascript functionality provides classy image veiwing

  


Despite contemporary browsers supporting a wealth of CSS3 properties, most designers and developers seem to focus on the quite harmless properties such as border-radius, box-shadow or transform. These are well documented, well tested and frequently used, and so it’s almost impossible to not stumble on them these days if you are designing websites.

But hidden deep within the treasure chests of browsers are advanced, heavily underrated properties that don’t get that much attention. Perhaps some of them rightly so, but others deserve more recognition. The greatest wealth lies under the hood of WebKit browsers, and in the age of iPhone, iPad and Android apps, getting acquainted with them can be quite useful. Even the Gecko engine, used by Firefox and the like, provides some distinct properties. In this article, we wisll look at some of the less known CSS 2.1 and CSS3 properties and their support in modern browsers.

Some explanation: For each property, I state the support: “WebKit” means that it is available only in browsers that use the WebKit engine (Safari, Chrome, iPhone, iPad, Android), and “Gecko” indicates the availability in Firefox and the like. Finally, certain properties are part of the official CSS 2.1. specification, which means that a broad range of browsers, even older ones, support them. Finally, a label of CSS3 indicates adherence to this specification, supported by the latest browser versions, such as Firefox 4, Chrome 10, Safari 5, Opera 11.10 and Internet Explorer 9.

WebKit-Only Properties
-webkit-mask
This property is quite extensive, so a detailed description is beyond the scope of this article and is certainly worth a more detailed examination, especially because it could turn out to be a time-saver in practical applications.

-webkit-mask makes it possible to apply a mask to an element, thereby enabling you to create a cut-out of any shape. The mask can either be a CSS3 gradient or a semi-transparent PNG image. An alpha value of 0 would cover the underlying element, and 1 would fully reveal the content behind. Related properties like -webkit-mask-clip, -webkit-mask-position and -webkit-mask-repeat rely heavily on the syntax of the ones from background. For more info, see the Surfin’ Safari blog and the link below.

Example

Image mask:

.element {
background: url(img/image.jpg) repeat;
-webkit-mask: url(img/mask.png);
}

Example

Gradient mask:

.element2 {
background: url(img/image.jpg) repeat;
-webkit-mask: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(rgba(0,0,0,1)), to(rgba(0,0,0,0)));
}

Further reading: Safari Developer Library

-webkit-text-stroke
One of the shortcomings of CSS borders is that only rectangular ones are possible. A ray of hope is -webkit-text-stroke, which gives text a border. Setting not only the width but the color of the border is possible. And in combination with color: transparent, you can create outlined text.

Examples

Assigns a blue border with a 2-pixel width to all <h1> headings:

h1 {-webkit-text-stroke: 2px blue}

Another feature is the ability to smooth text by setting a transparent border of 1 pixel:

h2 {-webkit-text-stroke: 1px transparent}

Creates text with a red outline:

h3 {
color: transparent;
-webkit-text-stroke: 4px red;
}

Further reading: Safari Developer Library

-webkit-nbsp-mode
Wrapping can be pretty tricky. Sometimes you want text to break (and not wrap) at certain points, and other times you don’t want this to happen. One property to control this is -webkit-nbsp-mode. It lets you change the behavior of the &nbsp; character, forcing text to break even where it is used. This behavior is enabled by the value space.

Further reading: Safari Developer Library

-webkit-tap-highlight-color
This one is just for iOS (iPhone and iPad). When you tap on a link or a JavaScript clickable element, it is highlighted by a semi-transparent gray background. To override this behavior, you can set -webkit-tap-highlight-color to any color. To disable this highlighting, a color with an alpha value of 0 must be used.

Example

Sets the highlight color to red, with a 50% opacity:

-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(255,0,0,0.5);

Supported by: iOS only (iPhone and iPad).

Further reading: Safari Developer Library

zoom: reset
Normally, zoom is an Internet Explorer-only property. But in combination with the value reset, WebKit comes into play (which, funny enough, IE doesn’t support). It enables you to override the standard behavior of zooming on websites. If set with a CSS declaration, everything except the given element is enlarged when the user zooms on the page.

Further reading: Safari Developer Library

-webkit-margin-collapse
Here is a property with a quite limited practical use, but it is still worth mentioning. By default, the margins of two adjacent elements collapse, which means that the bottom distance of the first element and the top distance of the second element merge into a single gap.

The best example is two <p>s that share their margins when placed one after another. To control this behavior, we can use -webkit-margin-collapse, -webkit-margin-top-collapse or -webkit-margin-bottom-collapse. The standard value is collapse. The separate value stops the sharing of margins, which means that both the bottom margin of the first element and the top margin of the second are included.

Further reading: Safari Developer Library

-webkit-box-reflect
Do you remember the days when almost every website featured a reflection of either its logo or some text in the header? Thankfully, those days are gone, but if you’d like to make a subtle use of this technique for your buttons, navigation or other UI elements with CSS, then -webkit-box-reflect is the property for you.

It accepts the keywords above, below, left and right, which set where the reflection is drawn, as well as a numeric value that sets the distance between the element and its reflection. Beyond that, mask images are supported as well (see -webkit-mask for an explanation of masks). The reflection is created automatically and has no effect on the layout. Following elements are created using only CSS, and the second button is reflected using the -webkit-box-reflect-property.

Examples

This reflection would be shown under its parent element and have a spacing of 5 pixels:

-webkit-box-reflect: below 5px;

This reflection would be cast on the right side of the element, with no distance (0); additionally, a mask would be applied (url(mask.png)):

-webkit-box-reflect: right 0 url(mask.png);

Further reading: Safari Developer Library

-webkit-marquee
Here is another property that recalls the good ol’ days when marquees were quite common. Interesting that this widely dismissed property turns out to be be useful today, when we shift content on tiny mobile screens that would otherwise not be fully visible without wrapping.

The weather application by ozPDA makes great use of it. (If you don’t see shifting text, just select another city at the bottom of the app. WebKit browser required.)

Example

.marquee {
white-space: nowrap;
overflow:-webkit-marquee;
width: 70px;
-webkit-marquee-direction: forwards;
-webkit-marquee-speed: slow;
-webkit-marquee-style: alternate;
}

There are some prerequisites for the marquee to work. First, white-space must be set to nowrap if you want the text to be on one line. Also, overflow must be set to -webkit-marquee, and width set to something narrower than the full length of the text.

The remaining properties ensure that the text scrolls from left to right (-webkit-marquee-direction), shifts back and forth (-webkit-marquee-style) and moves at a slow rate (-webkit-marquee-speed). Additional properties are -webkit-marquee-repetition, which sets how many iterations the marquee should pass through, and -webkit-marquee-increment, which defines the degree of speed in each increment.

Further reading: Safari Developer Library

Gecko-Only Properties
font-size-adjust
Unfortunately, this useful CSS3 property is supported only by Firefox at the moment. We can use it to specify that the font size for a given element should relate to the height of lowercase letters (x-height) rather than the height of uppercase letters (cap height). For example, Verdana is much more legible at the same size than Times, which has a much shorter x-height. To compensate for this behavior, we can adjust the latter with font-size-adjust.

This property is particularly useful in CSS font stacks whose fonts have different x-heights. Even if you’re careful to use only similar fonts, font-size-adjust can provide a solution when problems arise.

Example

If Verdana is not installed on the user’s machine for some reason, then Arial is adjusted so that it has the same aspect ratio as Verdana, which is 0.58 (at a font size of 12px, differs on other sizes).

p {
font-family:Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
font-size-adjust: 0.58;
}

Supported by: Gecko.

Further reading: Mozilla Developer Network

image-rendering
A few years ago, images that were not displayed at their original size and were scaled by designers, could appear unattractive or just plain wrong in the browser, depending on the size and context. Nowadays, browsers have a much better algorithm for displaying resized images, however, it’s great to have a full control over the ways your images will be displayed when scaled, especially with responsive images becoming a de facto standard in responsive Web designs.

This Gecko-specific property is particularly useful if you have an image with sharp lines and want to maintain them after resizing. The relevant value would be -moz-crisp-edges. The same algorithm is used at optimizeSpeed, whereas auto and optimizeQuality indicate the standard behavior (which is to resize elements with the best possible quality). The image-rendering property can also be applied to <video> and <canvas> elements, as well as background […]

  The hard work of front-end designers never ceases to amaze us. Over the last months, we’ve seen Web designers creating and presenting a plethora of truly remarkable CSS techniques and tools. We have collected, analyzed, curated and feature latest useful resources for your convenience, so you can use them right away or save them for future reference.
Please don’t hesitate to comment on this post and let us know how exactly you are using them in your workflow. However, please avoid link dropping, but share your insights and your experience instead. Also, notice that some techniques are not only CSS-based, but use HTML5, JavaScript, or JavaScript-libraries as well. Thanks to all featured designers and developers for inspiring, hard work.
CSS TechniquesRotational SlidersEric Meyer shares six of his animated transforms that are capable of sliding around to a particular extent with non-centered transform origins.

Generating Organic Randomness with Prime Numbers and CSSAt first, you may be wondering why the heck is Alex Walker talking about cicada’s and Web design. Once taking a closer look, a sort of connection between the two evolves and a ‘cicada principle’ is born.

CSS3 3D HologramBeing inspired by holographic effects that can be achieved with HTML/CSS, Hakim El Hattab has developed his own 3D box which alters perspective depending on device orientation. Note that this requires a webkit browser and has only been tested on iPhone. Also make sure to visit more of Hakim’s CSS/HTML5 experiments.

Checkerboard, striped & other background patterns with CSS3 gradientsYou’re probably familiar with CSS3 gradients by now, including the closer to the standard Mozilla syntax and the verbose Webkit one. I assume you know how to add multiple color stops, make your gradients angled or create radial gradients. What you might not be aware of, is that CSS3 gradients can be used to create many kinds of commonly needed patterns, including checkered patterns, stripes and more. Also, check out Lea’s CSS3 Patterns Gallery
CSS3 KeyboardClick in the box and start typing on your computer’s keyboard. Cleverly developed by Dustin Cartwright and Dustin Hoffman. You’ve got to respect the amount of time and effort which went into producing this demo.

CSS3 Progress BarsA couple of nice progress bars created by Chris Coyier that use no images — just CSS3 fancies. In browsers that do not support CSS3, these progress bars will look more simplified.

Hover on “Everything But”A tutorial by Chris Coyier which shows us how easy adding a hover state to an element can be. In this case, the hover state is applied to everything but the element actually being hovered over.

Creating a Sphere With 3D CSSWith CSS3’s 3D trans­forms it’s possible to cre­ate a sphere-like object, albeit with many elements. Paul Hayes shares his version of a 3D CSS sphere (works in the latest Safari and iOS) and provides us with the coding needed.

CSS3 PlanetariumThis demo highlights leading edge CSS3 and HTML5 features that Mozilla Firefox and the open web community push into modern Web browsers.

Natural Object-Rotation with CSS3 3DA tutorial by Dirk Weber that teaches us how to build a 3D packshot in HTML and CSS by applying some CSS 3D-transforms. By adding some Javascript, we can make the object freely rotatable in 3D space. And as we will enhance our Javascript with some touch-interactivity, the packshot will also work nicely in Safari for iOS-platforms like iPhone or iPad.

CSS Drop-Shadows Without ImagesNicolas Gallagher shares presents his CSS drop-shadows without any images.

Incrementable Length Values in Text FieldsLea Verou explains how to implement a feature that allows you to increment or decrement a <length> value by pressing the up and down keyboard arrows when the caret is over it.

Beveled Corners & Negative Border-Radius with CSS3 GradientsBeveled corners and simulate negative border radius without images, by utilizing CSS3 gradients once again — Lea Verou is amazed by how many CSS problems can be solved with gradients alone. Works on Firefox 3.6+, latest Webkit Nightly builds, Chrome and Opera 11.10.

Flexible Height Vertical Centering With CSS, Beyond IE7Roger Johansson shares his thoughts on how to improve centering an element both horizontally and vertically with the display:table alternative.

Coding up a semantic, lean timelineThis article tells you how to create a semantic lean timeline.

CSS Border Tricks with Collapsed BoxesThese border tricks tricks will help you to display content outside of the content box, over borders, without the use of images, CSS3 gradients or extraneous markup.

Quick Tip: Nonintrusive CSS Text GradientsJeffrey Way shows some ways for creating pure CSS text-gradients with a bit of trickery. The key is to use a mix of attribute selectors, webkit-specific properties, and custom HTML attributes.

Bokeh with CSS3 GradientsDivya Manian uses the CSS gradients and shows the results of his work on a project which uses a bunch of circles as a decorative background.

Different Transitions for Hover On / Hover OffChris Coyier tries to acchieve “different transitions on mouseenter and mouseleave”, but he isn’t using JavaScript here; we’re talking about CSS :hover state and CSS3 transitions. Hover on, some CSS property animates itself to a new value; hover off, a different CSS property animates.

Styling children based on their number, with CSS3Lea Verou shows how to style children of elements based on their total number (that is, their total count).

CSS ModalUsing CSS3 tech­niques a modal box can be cre­ated with­out JavaScript or images. With a bit of ani­ma­tion, tran­si­tion and trans­form, it can be made that lit­tle bit more special. The problem: when you hit the “Back”-button after the modal has popped up and was closed, you’ll see the modal again. But maybe you’ll come with a way to fix it?

Rotating Feature BoxesThe full effect of it (with transition animations) will work in newish WebKit and Opera browsers and Firefox 4 (in real beta as of today). Any other browser will rotate the blocks without transition animation.

When and How to Visually Hide ContentVisually hiding content on a web page, usually textual content, is at times a viable technique in web design and development. It can be done for several reasons, most importantly, to improve the experience of a screen reader user. Other reasons include improving readability when CSS cannot be rendered, and improving search engine optimization (SEO). Other exaples about using the Visually Hide Content are shown in this article.

How to avoid common CSS3 mistakesThe new features of CSS3 bring with them complexity and new things for us to screw up. This article will help keep us in check as we start using these new features.

Introduction to CSS Escape SequencesEscape sequences are useful because they allow style sheet authors to represent characters that would normally be ignored or interpreted differently by traditional CSS parsing rules. In this article Mert Tol shows how to use these sequences.

Wrapping Long URLs and Text Content with CSSTo wrap long URLs, strings of text, and other content, you can just apply a carefully crafted chunk of CSS code to any block-level element .

CSS Generated ContentTrevor Davis shows on some examples what you can do with the CSS generated content.

Controlling width with CSS3 box-sizingAn incredibly useful CSS3 feature when you’re creating columns with floats is box-sizing. It lets you choose which box sizing model to use – whether or not an element’s width and height include padding and border or not. It makes it much easier to define flexible widths where you also need padding and/or borders. A typical example is laying out forms, which can be a real pain when you want flexible widths.

Revisit Hardboiled CSS3 Media QueriesShi Chuan takes a close look at boilerplates and helps us understand the math we need to tweak the width required for a good resolution to any particular device.
iPad Orientation CSSKeith Chu revises Cloud Four’s work and finds a way to alleviate extra HTTP requests, not iPad-specific as well as lack of reusability. In this post, he shares with us his proposed revision to the iPad orientation CSS.
CSS Value Lengths, Times, Frequencies and AnglesIn this article the authors go over all the math type units that can be applied as property values in CSS.
CSS Tools320 and up‘320 and Up’ prevents mobile devices from downloading desktop assets by using a tiny screen’s stylesheet as its starting point. Try this page at different window sizes and on different devices to see it in action.

CSS3 Generator – By Eric Hoffman and Peter FunkThis generator was proudly designed by Eric Hoffman and coded by Peter Funk.

CSS Pattern GeneratorPatternify is a simple pattern generator that enables you to not only build your patterns online, but export them with the base64 code, so you don’t even need an image file anymore. Just include the code in your CSS and you’re ready to go. Created by Sacha Greif.

Griddle.it – Web page alignment made easyA clean and simple way to help align your layouts. No complex grid frameworks necessary.Just put your dimensions after our URL to get a background guide image to work with in your browser. Grids are created on the fly, so any combination should work.

The 1140px Grid: Fluid down to mobileThe 1140 grid fits perfectly into a 1280 monitor. On smaller monitors it becomes fluid and adapts to the width of the browser.

Fighting the @font-face FOUTPaul Irish’s 2011 update for the @font-face FOUT issue. Good news: Firefox 4 has no FOUT, IE9 does, and FOUT-b-GONE will help you out with that.

CSS3 Github ButtonsCSS3 Buttons is a simple framework for creating good-looking GitHub style button links.

CSS3 Facebook ButtonsCSS3 Facebook Buttons

MinimeeOn the Internets, speed is everything – which means that when it comes t[…]

  Although CSS isn’t that difficult, useful CSS techniques are not easy to find. Sometimes finding a cross-browser solution might take time, but you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time. Other designers may have had the same problem in the past and thus the main goal of this round-up is to share with you a goldmine of new techniques which you will hopefully find very useful and valuable. We also hope that these tutorials and articles will help you solve common design problems and find new ways of approaching tricky CSS issues.
The main goal of the article is to present powerful new CSS techniques, encourage experimentation in the design community and push CSS forward. Please notice that we feature both experimental demos and practical techniques in this article. Next week we will present even more useful new tools and resources for front-end developers. We sincerely appreciate the efforts of the design community — thank you, guys!
Interesting and Original TechniquesWonder-Webkit: 3D TransformsThis is a remarkable example of what can be done using CSS3 3D transformations. The interesting stuff is the possibility of manipulate the transformation matrix of any element of the DOM, In this case we get the matrix given only the four end points of the element. Don’t forget to click on the items, too. Who thought a couple of years ago that something like that would be possible with only CSS?

CSS Box Shadow & Text Shadow ExperimentsThe CSS box-shadow and text-shadow allow us to create some pretty cool design elements that don’t even look like shadows. The key is to think about how CSS shadows work and use them to get the desired effect. The article features three remarkable examples of using box-shadow property creatively to achieve effects that don’t have much to do with shadows.

CSS3 Depth of FieldSawyer Hollenshead’s experiment is an attempt to create the “Depth of Field” effect with CSS. The blurry text is accomplished using text-shadow, with the text color set to transparent. Take a look at the demo and don’t forget to press ‘n’ to toggle animation.

Art Deco Selectable TextThis is a quick proof-of-concept of split typography, based on Pierre Fix-Masseau’s Art Deco style. The challenge was to have this kind of ‘split letters’ as part of a web page layout, while retaining the ability to select text.

CSS3 :toggle-button without JavaScriptThis demo presents a CSS3 toggle-button that works without JavaScript. If you ever need it: You stack two <a>s on top of each other and then disable pointer-events for the top <a> on :target.

About War and BananasThis student project explores new ways of styling and designing websites in an artistic way. The students from Merz Akademie in Germany used Picasso’s “Guernica” as the footage, seperated the picture into different layers and animated them using CSS.

WebKit ClockThis demo is driven by HTML5 canvas, CSS3, JavaScript, Web Fonts, SVG and no image files. The CSS file is huge, yet the result is quite remarkable.

Pure CSS SlideshowThis technique uses CSS transforms and positioning to create the pure CSS-based slideshow. Unfortunately, no documentation is available (yet).

CSS DockThis is a quick CSS3 experiment trying to replicate the Dock of OS X, complete with labels, animations, reflections and indicators. It uses CSS transitions for the magnification effect and the :target pseudo-class and CSS animations for the bouncing effect.

Andrew HoyerAn interesting experiment by Andrew Hoyer. The walking man is implemented using only CSS3 animations and simple HTML. The key idea behind all of this is the fact that a CSS transformation applied to an element also applies to all of its children. Works in Webkit-browsers only.

Type study: An all CSS buttonDan Cederholm explains how through the use of box-shadow, text-shadow, border-radius, and CSS gradients, we can create a highly polished three-dimensional, responsive button that doesn’t require images.

3D TextThis technique uses multiple text-shadows to create a 3D appearance of the text on any HTML element. No extra mark-up is used. Works in the latest builds of Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.

Spin those Icons with CSS3Tom Kenny features a neat effect which spins the social icons with the help of a CSS transforms and transition when you hover over them. A very nice enhancement.

The Shapes of CSSThe article presents various geometrical forms, all created using CSS and a single HTML element. The following forms are presented: square, rectangle, circle, oval, triangle, parallelogram, trapezoid, star, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, heart and infinity — all using CSS only.

CSS background image hacksEmulating background image crop, background image opacity, background transforms, and improved background positioning. The article explains a few hacks relying on CSS pseudo-elements to emulate features unavailable or not yet widely supported by modern browsers.

Making Better Select Elements with CSS3 and jQueryThis tutorial explains how to take an ordinary select element, and replace it with a better looking version, while keeping all the functionality intact. It uses CSS3 multiple background and a transparent PNG image as a sprite. Currently, multiple backgrounds are supported by Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. For Internet Explorer and older versions of the first browsers, a fallback is defined, which is basically just a regular version of the background. When parsing the CSS document, browsers that do not understand multiple background will just ignore the rule and use the plain one.

CSS-Only 3D SlideshowThis tutorial shows how to create a 3D slideshow using only HTML and CSS. No JavaScript required. You’ll be able to mimic a click event with CSS using the :focus pseudo-class and the HTML5 element <figcaption>, but the idea is the same. As the author admits, this method isn’t necessarily “better” than using JavaScript, but simply a neat alternative that takes advantages of the newest HTML5 elements.

Have Fun with BordersThis tutorial shows three simple technique to add a light shadow, “pressed” and “beveled” states to text blocks and images. By Soh Tanaka.

Animated CSS3 Owl “What about having an owl that moved his eyes every so often and when hovered over would raise his wings while a few light rays would spin in the background. A little excessive? Probably. Necessary? Not at all. However, that’s exactly what I was looking to do with CSS3 transforms, transitions, and animations.” An interesting experiment, best viewed in Safari or Chrome.

CSS Social Sign-in ButtonsThis blog post describes a fairly simple technique for creating nice responsive CSS-buttons using a CSS sprite, border-radius, shadows and CSS gradients.

Rotating color cube box with CSS3 animation, transforms and gradientsA yet another remarkable experiment that presents a rotating color cube using CSS3 animations and transforms. Be aware that the browser may slow down a bit when loading the demo.

CSS3 Demo: 3D Interactive GalaxyA CSS3 demo where you can interact with a procedurally generated 3D galaxy. In order to create the effect, the designer used 3D CSS properties available in Safari 5 and on the iPhone and iPad.

Getting Hardboiled with CSS3 2D TransformsAndy Clarke explains how to use CSS3 two-dimensional transforms to add realism to a row of hardboiled private detectives’ business cards. The working demo is available as well.

How to create Microsoft Office Minibar with jQuery and CSS3Janko Jovanovic explains how to create a Microsoft Office Minibar that exposes context-related functionality. In case of MS Word, context is a text selection. Since Minibar always pops up near the mouse pointer it enables users to quickly perform actions related to a selection.

Angled Content Mask with CSSThis article explains how to create angled CSS content “masks”. The idea is pretty simple and uses CSS transform property (rotation, to be more precise).

Rotating Feature BoxesAll the animation here are CSS3 transitions. JavaScript only watches for the clicks and applies and removes classes as needed. So when you click on a block, that block’s class’ is adjusted. The new classes have different size and position values. Because the block has transition CSS applied, those new sizes and postion values are animated as well.

Pure CSS3 box-shadow page curl effectOkay, the CSS3 code here is quirky and might seem a bit bloated first, but it’s a nice example of using various CSS3 features together to create an effect that would usually require images.

Pure CSS Folded-Corner EffectLearn how to create a simple CSS folded-corner effect without images or extra markup. It works well in all modern browsers and is best suited to designs with simple colour backgrounds; supported by Firefox 3.5+, Chrome 4+, Safari 4+, Opera 10+, IE 8+.

Useful Practical TechniquesSmooth Fading Image Captions with Pure CSS3Learn how to use CSS3 transitions to create nice, animated, semitransparent image captions. Full example and code download included.

Fade Image Into AnotherLearn how to create an image rollover by giving the element a background image. There are three ways to fade in the opacity. Click here to find out more:

New @Font-Face Syntax: Simpler, EasierWith IE9 and FF4 nearing release, Ethan Dunham from Font Squirrel has revisited the problem of a cross-browser CSS @font-face syntax and found a new and simpler solution. In this article, Richard Fink explains the new syntax and its variations and suggests the most reasonable syntax to use. Also, check FontSpring’s The New Bulletproof @font-face Syntax. Please notice that this technique no longer works in Internet Explorer 9.

The New Clearfix MethodThe clearfix hack, or “easy-clearing” hack, is a useful method of clearing floats. The original clearfix hack works great, but the browsers that it targets are either obsolete or well on their way. T[…]

  This article is an excerpt from Eric Meyer’s recent book Smashing CSS, published by Wiley in cooperation with Smashing Magazine.
In this article, the focus is on what’s coming: styling techniques you’ll use in the immediate and near-term future. From styling HTML 5 elements to rearranging layout based on display parameters to crazy selection patterns to transforming element layout, these are all techniques that you may use tomorrow, next month, or next year. With partial browser support, they’re all on the cutting edge of Web design.
Accordingly, be careful not to get cut! A number of useful sites can help you figure out the exact syntaxes and patterns you need to use these techniques.
Furthermore, a number of JavaScript libraries can extend support for advanced CSS back into older browsers, in some cases as far back as IE/Win 5.5. Some are very narrowly focused on certain browser families, whereas others are more broadly meant to allow support in all known browsers. These can be useful in cases where your visitors haven’t quite caught up with the times but you don’t want them to miss out on all the fun. (Some of these libraries are CSS3 PIE, cssSandpaper, :select[ivizr], ie7-js, eCSStender).
There are also a good many CSS enhancements available as plug-ins for popular JavaScript libraries such as jQuery. If you’re a user of such a library, definitely do some digging to see what’s been created. Again: Be careful! While these techniques are powerful and can deliver a lot of power to your pages, you need to test them thoroughly in the browsers of the day to make sure you didn’t just accidentally make the page completely unreadable in older browsers.
Styling HTML 5Styling HTML 5 is really no different than styling HTML 4. There are a bunch of new elements, but styling them is basically the same as styling any other element. They generate the same boxes as any other div, span, h2, a, or what have you.
The HTML 5 specification is still being worked on as of this writing, so this may change a bit over time, but the following declarations may be of use to older browsers that don’t know quite what to do with the new elements.

article, aside, canvas, details, embed, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section, summary {
display: block;
}
command, datalist, keygen, mark, meter, progress, rp, rt, ruby, time, wbr {
display: inline;
}
You may have noticed that I left out two fairly important new elements: audio and video. That’s because it’s hard to know exactly how to treat them. Block? Inline? All depends on how you plan to use them. Anyway, you can place them in the declaration that makes the most sense to you.
But what about really old browsers, like IE6? (Note I said “old,” not “unused.” In an interesting subversion of popular culture, browser popularity has very little to do with age.) For those, you need to use a bit of JavaScript in order to get the browser to recognize them and therefore be able to style them. There’s a nice little script that auto-forces old versions of IE to play nicely with HTML 5 elements. If you’re going to use and style them, you should definitely grab that script and put it to use.
Once you’ve gotten your browser ducks in a row and quacking “The Threepenny Opera,” you can get down to styling. Remember: There’s really nothing new about styling with these new elements. For example:

figure {
float: left;
border: 1px solid gray;
padding: 0.25em;
margin: 0 0 1.5em 1em;
}
figcaption {
text-align: center;
font: italic 0.9em Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}

<img src="splash.jpg" alt="A toddler’s face is obscured by a rippled and dimpled wall of water thrown up by her hands slapping into the surface of the swimming pool in whose waters she sits.">
SPLASH SPLASH SPLASH!!!

Figure 7-1: A styled HTML 5 figure and figure caption.
Classing like HTML 5Perhaps you like the new semantics of HTML 5, but you’re just not ready to take your sites to full-on HTML 5. Maybe your site’s user base is mostly older browsers and you’d rather stick to known quantities like HTML 4 or XHTML. Not to worry: You can have the best of both worlds with the venerable class attribute.
This approach was documented by Jon Tan in his article. The basic idea is to use old-school elements like div and span, and add to them classes that exactly mirror the element names in HTML 5. Here’s a code example.

.figure {
float: left;
border: 1px solid gray;
padding: 0.25em;
margin: 0 0 1.5em 1em;
}
.figcaption {
text-align: center;
font: italic 0.9em Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}

<img src="spring.jpg" alt="A small child with twin pigtail braids, her back to the camera, swings away from the camera on a playground swingset while the late afternoon sun peeks over the crossbar of the swingset.">
<div class="figcaption">Swinging into spring.</div>

Figure 7-2: A styled HTML 4-classed figure and figure caption.
If you compare the styles there to those found in the preceding section, you’ll see that the only difference is that the names figure and figcaption are preceded by periods — thus marking them as class names. The markup is a little different, of course, though it’s the same basic structure.
The advantage of this approach is that if you have these styles in place at the point when you decide you can convert to HTML 5, then all you need to do is change your markup to use HTML 5 elements instead of classed divs and then strip off the periods to turn the class selectors into element selectors. That’s it. Easy as cake!
Media QueriesThis could honestly be its own article, or possibly even its own book. Thus, what follows will necessarily be just a brief taste of the possibilities. You should definitely follow up with more research, because in a lot of ways this is the future of Web styling.
The point of media queries is to set up conditional blocks of styles that will apply in different media environments. For example, you could write one set of styles for portrait displays and another for landscape displays. You might change the colors based on the bit depth of the display. You could change the font based on the pixel density of display. You might even rearrange the page’s layout depending on the width or number of pixels available in the display.
Figure 7-3: A basic three-column layout.
How? Consider some basic layout styles for a three-column layout:

body {
background: #FFF;
color: #000;
font: small Arial, sans-serif;
}
.col {
position: relative;
margin: 3em 1%;
padding: 0.5em 1.5%;
border: 1px solid #aaa;
border-width: 1px 1px 0 1px;
float: right;
width: 20%;
}
#two {
width: 40%;
}
#footer {
clear: both;
}
As nice as this might be (in a minimalist sort of way), it is likely to run into trouble on smaller—which is to say, narrower—displays. What if you could magically change to a two-column layout on such displays?
Well, you can. First, restrict the three-column layout to environments that are more than 800 pixels across. This is done by splitting the layout bits into their own declarations:

body {
background: #fff;
color: #000;
font: small Arial, sans-serif;
}
.col {
position: relative;
margin: 3em 1%;
padding: 0.5em 1.5%;
border: 1px solid #aaa;
border-width: 1px 1px 0 1px;
}
#footer {
clear: both;
}
.col {
float: right;
width: 20%;
}
#two {
width: 40%;
}
Then wrap those last two declarations in a media query:

@media all and (min-width: 800px) {
.col {
float: right;
width: 20%;
}
#two {
width: 40%;
}
}
What that says is “the rules inside this curly-brace block apply in all media that have a minimum display width of 800 pixels.” Anything below that, no matter the medium, and the rules inside the block will be ignored. Note the parentheses around the min-width term and its value. These are necessary any time you have a term and value (which are referred to as an expression).
At this point, nothing will really change unless you shrink the browser window until it offers fewer than 800 pixels across to the document. At that point, the columns stop floating altogether.
Figure 7-4: What happens below 800 pixels.
What you can do at this point is write another media-query block of layout rules that apply in narrower conditions. Say you want a two-column layout between 500 and 800 pixels):

@media all and (min-width: 500px) and (max-width: 799px) {
.col {
float: left;
width: 20%;
}
#two {
float: right;
width: 69%;
}
#three {
clear: left;
margin-top: 0;
}
}
Figure 7-5: The reworked layout, which shows between 500 and 800 pixels.
And finally, you can apply some single-column styles for any medium with fewer than 500 pixels of display width:

@media all and (max-width: 499px) {
#one {
text-align: center;
}
#one li {
display: inline;
list-style: none;
padding: 0 0.5em;
border-right: 1px solid gray;
line-height: 1.66;
}
#one li:last-child {
border-right: 0;
}
#three {
display: none;
}
}
Figure 7-6: Single-column layout, which shows below 500 pixels.
Note that in all these queries, layout styles are defined in relation to the display area of the browser window. More generically, they are defined in relation to the display area available to the document in any medium in which it is rendered. That means that if a printer, for example, is used to print the document and it has an available display area 784 pixels wide, then the two-column layout will be for printing.
To restrict the column shifting to screen media only, alter the queries, like so:

@media screen and (min-width: 800px) {...}
@media screen and (min-width: 500px) and (max-width: 799px) {...}
@media screen and (max-width: 499px) {...}
But what if you want the three-column layout used in some non-screen media, like print and TV displays? Then add in th[…]

  Almost every new client these days wants a mobile version of their website. It’s practically essential after all: one design for the BlackBerry, another for the iPhone, the iPad, netbook, Kindle — and all screen resolutions must be compatible, too. In the next five years, we’ll likely need to design for a number of additional inventions. When will the madness stop? It won’t, of course.
In the field of Web design and development, we’re quickly getting to the point of being unable to keep up with the endless new resolutions and devices. For many websites, creating a website version for each resolution and new device would be impossible, or at least impractical. Should we just suffer the consequences of losing visitors from one device, for the benefit of gaining visitors from another? Or is there another option?
Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. In other words, the website should have the technology to automatically respond to the user’s preferences. This would eliminate the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market.
The Concept Of Responsive Web DesignEthan Marcotte wrote an introductory article about the approach, “Responsive Web Design,” for A List Apart. It stems from the notion of responsive architectural design, whereby a room or space automatically adjusts to the number and flow of people within it:
“Recently, an emergent discipline called “responsive architecture” has begun asking how physical spaces can respond to the presence of people passing through them. Through a combination of embedded robotics and tensile materials, architects are experimenting with art installations and wall structures that bend, flex, and expand as crowds approach them. Motion sensors can be paired with climate control systems to adjust a room’s temperature and ambient lighting as it fills with people. Companies have already produced “smart glass technology” that can automatically become opaque when a room’s occupants reach a certain density threshold, giving them an additional layer of privacy.”
Transplant this discipline onto Web design, and we have a similar yet whole new idea. Why should we create a custom Web design for each group of users; after all, architects don’t design a building for each group size and type that passes through it? Like responsive architecture, Web design should automatically adjust. It shouldn’t require countless custom-made solutions for each new category of users.
Obviously, we can’t use motion sensors and robotics to accomplish this the way a building would. Responsive Web design requires a more abstract way of thinking. However, some ideas are already being practiced: fluid layouts, media queries and scripts that can reformat Web pages and mark-up effortlessly (or automatically).
But responsive Web design is not only about adjustable screen resolutions and automatically resizable images, but rather about a whole new way of thinking about design. Let’s talk about all of these features, plus additional ideas in the making.Adjusting Screen ResolutionWith more devices come varying screen resolutions, definitions and orientations. New devices with new screen sizes are being developed every day, and each of these devices may be able to handle variations in size, functionality and even color. Some are in landscape, others in portrait, still others even completely square. As we know from the rising popularity of the iPhone, iPad and advanced smartphones, many new devices are able to switch from portrait to landscape at the user’s whim. How is one to design for these situations?

In addition to designing for both landscape and portrait (and enabling those orientations to possibly switch in an instant upon page load), we must consider the hundreds of different screen sizes. Yes, it is possible to group them into major categories, design for each of them, and make each design as flexible as necessary. But that can be overwhelming, and who knows what the usage figures will be in five years? Besides, many users do not maximize their browsers, which itself leaves far too much room for variety among screen sizes.
Morten Hjerde and a few of his colleagues identified statistics on about 400 devices sold between 2005 and 2008. Below are some of the most common:

Since then even more devices have come out. It’s obvious that we can’t keep creating custom solutions for each one. So, how do we deal with the situation?
Part of the Solution: Flexible EverythingA few years ago, when flexible layouts were almost a “luxury” for websites, the only things that were flexible in a design were the layout columns (structural elements) and the text. Images could easily break layouts, and even flexible structural elements broke a layout’s form when pushed enough. Flexible designs weren’t really that flexible; they could give or take a few hundred pixels, but they often couldn’t adjust from a large computer screen to a netbook.
Now we can make things more flexible. Images can be automatically adjusted, and we have workarounds so that layouts never break (although they may become squished and illegible in the process). While it’s not a complete fix, the solution gives us far more options. It’s perfect for devices that switch from portrait orientation to landscape in an instant or for when users switch from a large computer screen to an iPad.
In Ethan Marcotte’s article, he created a sample Web design that features this better flexible layout:

The entire design is a lovely mix of fluid grids, fluid images and smart mark-up where needed. Creating fluid grids is fairly common practice, and there are a number of techniques for creating fluid images:
Hiding and Revealing Portions of ImagesCreating Sliding Composite ImagesForeground Images That Scale With the LayoutFor more information on creating fluid websites, be sure to look at the book “Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS” by Zoe Mickley Gillenwater, and download the sample chapter “Creating Flexible Images.” In addition, Zoe provides the following extensive list of tutorials, resources, inspiration and best practices on creating flexible grids and layouts: “Essential Resources for Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts.”
While from a technical perspective this is all easily possible, it’s not just about plugging these features in and being done. Look at the logo in this design, for example:

If resized too small, the image would appear to be of low quality, but keeping the name of the website visible and not cropping it off was important. So, the image is divided into two: one (of the illustration) set as a background, to be cropped and to maintain its size, and the other (of the name) resized proportionally.

<h1 id="logo"><a href="#"><img src="site/logo.png" alt="The Baker Street Inquirer" /></a></h1>
Above, the h1 element holds the illustration as a background, and the image is aligned according to the container’s background (the heading).
This is just one example of the kind of thinking that makes responsive Web design truly effective. But even with smart fixes like this, a layout can become too narrow or short to look right. In the logo example above (although it works), the ideal situation would be to not crop half of the illustration or to keep the logo from being so small that it becomes illegible and “floats” up.Flexible ImagesOne major problem that needs to be solved with responsive Web design is working with images. There are a number of techniques to resize images proportionately, and many are easily done. The most popular option, noted in Ethan Marcotte’s article on fluid images but first experimented with by Richard Rutter, is to use CSS’s max-width for an easy fix.

img { max-width: 100%; }
As long as no other width-based image styles override this rule, every image will load in its original size, unless the viewing area becomes narrower than the image’s original width. The maximum width of the image is set to 100% of the screen or browser width, so when that 100% becomes narrower, so does the image. Essentially, as Jason Grigsby noted, “The idea behind fluid images is that you deliver images at the maximum size they will be used at. You don’t declare the height and width in your code, but instead let the browser resize the images as needed while using CSS to guide their relative size”. It’s a great and simple technique to resize images beautifully.
Note that max-width is not supported in IE, but a good use of width: 100% would solve the problem neatly in an IE-specific style sheet. One more issue is that when an image is resized too small in some older browsers in Windows, the rendering isn’t as clear as it ought to be. There is a JavaScript to fix this issue, though, found in Ethan Marcotte’s article.
While the above is a great quick fix and good start to responsive images, image resolution and download times should be the primary considerations. While resizing an image for mobile devices can be very simple, if the original image size is meant for large devices, it could significantly slow download times and take up space unnecessarily.
Filament Group’s Responsive ImagesThis technique, presented by the Filament Group, takes this issue into consideration and not only resizes images proportionately, but shrinks image resolution on smaller devices, so very large images don’t waste space unnecessarily on small screens. Check out the demo page here.

This technique requires a few fil[…]

useful web design principles