By Peter Bell

CSS For Web Projects - How do YOU Do it?

Posted At : July 11, 2008 3:02 PM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: CSS
We're looking for a standard approach to CSS to allow us to have more consistency between the css in our applications. We're looking for some best practices for building semantic, maintainable CSS in the minimum time in a relatively deskilled manner.

What do you do for your CSS? Do you use a framework like Blueprint or YUI Grids? Do you start off with a reset CSS to get a jump start? Do you break down your css into separate files (for editing)? Do you have an automated task for merging them (to minimize http hits in production)? I have some thoughts, but I'd love to get your input on what you do and why . . .

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The "Right" Way to Style Forms

Posted At : December 24, 2007 1:56 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: CSS, Forms
What do you think it the right way to style forms? Div's, DL/DT/DD, ordered lists? If you had to recommend a default way to mark up your forms, which approach would you recommend and why?

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Beautifying Blueprint CSS

Posted At : December 13, 2007 1:11 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: CSS, JavaScript, jQuery
Paul Marcotte just put together a proof of concept for using jQuery to beautiful the kind of css required to make Blueprint work . . .

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There Was a Dream Called CSS

Posted At : December 13, 2007 12:47 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: CSS
Once there was a dream. A dream of separating content from presentation. Of cleanly and easily being able to describe how your content should look and of sites where it would be trivial to display content differently just by feeding in a different style sheet to the same HTML. And then came browser implementations, and we all pretty much know what happened after that :-<

Well, I have a very personal dream for CSS . . .

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Structuring CSS

Posted At : December 12, 2007 10:19 PM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: CSS
I've been doing a lot of thinking about CSS over the last couple of days (sorry Clark, the project will be finished soon - honest!). I'd been thinking about this for a number of months, but I now have a couple of projects to apply this to, and I want to suggest some ideas for best practices for structuring CSS . . .

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CSS: Reset Reloaded

Posted At : September 28, 2007 6:47 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: CSS
What do YOU think of CSS snippets like Eric Meyers reset script? (Smashing magazine has a list of some others at the bottom of article). Do you create your own resets? Are there any other snippets you consistently put into your CSS? Do you have a mini in-house framework you'd be willing to share some of the ideas behind?

Thoughts?

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CSS Frameworks and Semantics

Posted At : September 27, 2007 9:02 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: CSS
I've been doing a lot of thinking about CSS recently. We need a framework for our sites so we can create them more efficiently, but I'm not sure that I love the open source offerings . . .

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What is a Website Made of?

Posted At : September 7, 2007 10:32 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: CSS, Front End
As part of my recent foray into CSS, I spent some time looking at the last 40 sites I've developed. A few were for direct clients, most were from one of our three primary design partners we worked with while we were developing SystemsForge. I found that from a semantic perspective there tended to be a pretty small number of common "container" elements we could have used to build almost all of the sites . . .

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Why Bother With CSS (Help me out!)?

Posted At : September 6, 2007 10:38 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: CSS, Front End
I try very hard to focus on the back end of the web applications we generate. Creating a system for quickly and efficiently generating the server side code for flexible, custom web apps is more than enough to keep me out of trouble. Unfortunately that isn't working out so well. Some of our clients create table based layouts which are inaccessible, bad for SEO and hard to maintain. Others ask us to outsource the production of CSS from jpeg mock-ups which has consistently resulted in CSS that is more tortured and hard to maintain (and no more semantic) that the table based layouts it is designed to improve upon . . .

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LightCSS - an Easy CSS Framework - any Interest?

Posted At : November 29, 2006 12:04 PM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: CSS
I've been playing with a bunch of the open source CSS frameworks, but I never really found a simple plug and play solution to my problem.

I wanted something where I could pick from a set of common conventions (with/without topbar, sidebar, rightbar, etc.) that supported pods within content areas, and that meant someone who knew very little CSS could still create tableless websites for the vast majority of simple sites in a short period of time using a standard approach.

I've been working with a very smart developer (Thomas Turnbull - expect to hear more about him in the future) to develop a CSS framework that makes it easy to create site templates in under an hour from a JPEG and that I could wrap with a CMS and generator to allow non-technical users to manage their CSS using a nice administrative wizard (that won't be done until early next year) . . .

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