CSS

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Comment by Stuart Elliot on June 15, 2009 at 8:59am

@Rich Harrington

the zen garden book is a great resource and an interesting read. It uses styles submitted to the actual site (http://www.csszengarden.com/) as case studies to explain a variety of issues in css design (and vallid xhtml for that matter).

Comment by Claudia Snell on June 5, 2009 at 9:37am

Hi all- I'm pretty new to this group and thought I'd introduce myself by way of sharing some recent articles from Jeffrey Zeldman that are interesting CSS/Font related:
http://www.zeldman.com/2009/05/23/web-fonts-now-how-were-doing-with-that/
and : http://www.zeldman.com/2009/05/28/real-fonts-on-the-web-part-2/

In addition, some great stuff for people struggling with floats:
http://www.zeldman.com/2009/05/29/all-about-floats/

Hope it helps someone. I'm looking forward to learning from and contributing to the group!

Comment by Curtiss Grymala on May 8, 2009 at 2:07pm

I tend to stick to the standard fonts. For some of my hobby sites, I'll define something a little obscure like Calibri (the sans-serif font that came bundled with Office 2007 and Vista, I believe) as the default, but I always define something like Arial as a fallback, and always, always, always specify the generic "sans-serif" (or "serif" or whatever generic family I'm using) font in my definitions.

The thing to be careful of is the fact that different fonts (even in the same basic family) can be radically different sizes. Calibri is considerably smaller than Arial. Therefore, if your site design relies heavily on the size of the font in order to be rendered correctly without overflowing, you have to be very careful.

Comment by Mike on May 7, 2009 at 5:05pm

I agree, always good idea to use the family. Especially with people using handheld devices these days. Too many different concerns for cross-browser and OS compatibility.
Then again, if you're using something like arial and a user is having problems, they're having problems on many sights. Hopefully they'd know it's on their end.

Comment by Tina on May 7, 2009 at 3:22pm

Sometimes I'll use a non-web font, if i think they are getting common enough ... but I always make sure that I list the web fonts afterward.

font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

Comment by Skip Knox on May 5, 2009 at 4:52pm

Choice of font is the same issue it's always been, since the invention of Mosaic. What are the odds that font is on the device reading your page?

I personally go with the generic font names and that's all the fussing I do. I can pretty well guarantee there will be some sort of serif and some sort of sans-serif and some sort of monospace. Everything else is speculation.

Comment by Sara Langenberg on May 5, 2009 at 4:43pm

So ..is anyone using special fonts in CSS -- Or is it still best to stick to the "web-friendly" fonts like Verdana and Arial?

Comment by Aaron Herd on March 19, 2009 at 12:58pm

I agree with Tina, though I have been pleased with Sitepoint's "Art and Science of CSS"

I think you can download part of it for free(?)
http://www.sitepoint.com/books/cssdesign1/

Comment by Tina on March 18, 2009 at 10:13am

I typically steer away from books (unless you are just starting out). The best practice for me is to look at websites, view their code and their css and see how its put together ... sort of a "Reverse Engineering". Definitely recommend Firefox Web Developers too bar, it makes viewing CSS code really simple!

articles at A List aPart relating to CSS
http://www.alistapart.com/topics/code/css/

articles at Smashing Magazine relating to CSS
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/category/css/



: ) don't forget to smile!

Comment by International Business Association on February 13, 2009 at 1:30pm

I always look online whenever I need to reference something. A simple google search for what you're trying to accomplish, along with "css" and/or "html" will usually give good results. If you're talking about starting completely from scratch, there are a ton of free layout sites that are cross-browser-compatible and usually pretty good.

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