I have a existing parent website and I have to design a new website with similar theme and css styles.
I do not have access to the code of the parent website in which I can look into the styling.
Is there a way I can extract or replicate the css style of the website and use it for the new one. I just need to get the same theme going in the new website as well.
I came across that I could use some adobe tools for the same.
Can anyone give a brief idea of how this can be done or is there a generic procedure to be followed in replicating the style.
Replicate given design using your own, most appropriate appropriate markup and CSS rules—and have some sort of QA process that will help you find obvious inconsistencies with appearance and interaction.
Why I don't think you want to copy HTML and CSS from the parent site:
The parent website can change its style later in an unpredictable way. You will have to duplicate these changes. Since you mentioned you don't have the access to the codebase, you can't just diff their changes and apply them to your codebase.
Therefore I'd say it's best to ignore the original HTML and CSS, and just follow your eye and have a QA that will carefully test your work for consistency with the original.
(I had to do a similar thing once, and I think it usually isn't required to follow parent website pixel-perfect—just consistent enough to facilitate painless navigation for the end user.
In cases where pixel-perfect consistency is required it makes more sense to build the additional website off the same codebase as original. You weren't given that possibility, so I doubt that perfection will be requested from you.)
I think Your trying to shoot fly with cannon. All javascript/css/html code is at Your hand when viewing sources. No advanced tools are needed.
For better look on minified files You may try developers tools provided by modern browsers like chrome and firefox.
You may also just use beautification tools for css and html like http://www.codebeautifier.com to get nice, indented document.
Just google html or css beautification and find the one that fit Your needs in best way. Most of them are free online tools.
The css is probably minified. This question shows ways to unminify it so you can read it.
Browsers such as Firefox and Chrome have a built in Code Inspector tool that will show you which styles are applied to each item. Just right-click on a page element (for example, a paragraph or heading), and select "Inspect Element" from the menu that appears. A toolbar will appear at the bottom of your window. Use the arrow on the toolbar to select different elements to examine. Usually the left side of that tool shows the HTML for that element and the right-side shows the CSS styles applied and the line of the css they come from. You can get a similar tool in IE by pressing the F12 key.
If you have a text editor that allows regular expressions in the search (Dreamweaver has this if you have the Creative Suite) use this search term with the "regular expression" box checked: #[a-z|0-9]{3,6}. This will find all of the hexadecimal values for the colors you need. It says to find the pound sign followed by either three or six letters or numbers, which will mostly be hexadecimal values (e.g. #333 or #333333 for dark grey). It may also bring up some IDs and you can ignore those and keep searching. You'll also want to search for rgba because colors may be listed that way. Using this in conjunction with the browser's code inspector will help you figure out the colors that are used on different elements. Some things may have background images, so you'll need to use the code inspector to figure that out. The code inspector will also show you how much padding you'll need, widths, etc.
Related
It has been brought to my attention that a website I'm helping out with sometimes has problems with span elements being injected. Those spans will break the whitespaces and make the text hard to read. Those spans look something like this:
<span data-contrast="auto">words</span>
<span data-contrast="auto">,</span>
<span data-contrast="auto">b</span>
<span data-contrast="auto">ut</span>
<span data-contrast="auto">sometimes also only single chars</span>
The website is run with/by WordPress, but that does not seem to be the cause because the affected posts look fine and show no sign of this markup in the post editor or database.
Also, those spans only seem to occur at nighttime. I tried to nail that down, but as so often, I couldn't really verify it yet, as it did not occur again to me, not even at night. Right now everything is fine and none of these spans are present.
I'm guessing it has got something to do with night-mode in browsers (although behaviour was the same in Edge and Firefox) or the night-mode in Windows but then on the other hand I haven't noticed this on any other page yet.
So, this is somewhat strange and hard to nail down, but you'll find copied texts that contain the same markup, when you use a search engine and search for "data-contrast span". So, at least I'm not the only one with this problem.
Any ideas how to nail this down and find out what causes it?
Browser plug-ins are usually given permission to modify page source at run time. I would guess the culprit is a cross-browser extension like Night Eye or Dark Reader.
In general, adding a <span> shouldn't mess with your layout unless your CSS is changing span properties away from the browser defaults.
Option 1
You might be able to fix the issue by adding CSS to control how the layout looks:
span[data-contrast="auto"] {...}
That will select all spans that have that data attribute. Then add styling to counteract the layout issues you see. That said, since the extension is adding the code after the page renders, it may override whatever you do.
Option 2
A better solution would be to create your own dark mode. Most plugins/OS night modes won't mess with your code if you provide your own theme options. A "dark" theme is the 2020 version of being mobile responsive; you should provide it in your code or live with the consequences when users, browser makers, and operating systems make their own decisions.
If you need help creating an alternate theme, CSS Tricks has a good write up.
Since it's not clear what software they are copying from, I've personally experienced this when copying from a Word Doc that's been opened in Microsoft Teams or in SharePoint, and then pasting directly into a website's editor (our site uses the TinyMCE text editor, a commonly utilized free text editor).
My recommendation: copy directly from the desktop version of Word, then paste into the editor and that prevents the "data-contrast" spans.
I assume there must be some hidden spans in non-desktop versions of Word Docs that they add to ensure the document displays the same way as the desktop version. The text editor doesn't know what to do with it, so it strips out everything, but the "data-contrast" portion.
Hope this helps someone out there as the original post was as asked some time ago.
I have a Windows 7 with service pack 1, and Internet Explorer 10. And I have my site, http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/ . It looks great on Chrome, Firefox and Safari, but not in Internet Explorer. For starters, I wanted to test how my site looks using IETester, and it's a mess (please compare by clicking the link above):
The thing is, I think that maybe the issue could be that IE8 doesn't load well from <object> tags, is that it? I use three object tags to load the three white parts: header, vertical menu, and "site log" (you can see them here: http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/header.html , http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/verticalmenu.html , http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/thesitelog.html)
To load those three sites, I use the following code:
This one for the header, <object type="text/html" data="http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/header.html" width="100%" height=185></object>
This one for the menu, <object type="text/html" data="http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/verticalmenu.html" height=484 width=100%></object>
And this one for the log, <center><object type="text/html" data="http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/thesitelog.html" height=600 width="90%"></object></center>
Please let me know if anyone has any ideas concerning this "mess". Thank you!!
This isn't a real answer (It's a quick and careless answer at best, so don't take it too seriously)
But I just thought I'd mention that the the W3C markup validator might be useful to you if you don't already know about it.. It catches bad markup practices or errors on your page and can give you more information on how to fix them. At the time of writing, your front page alone has 10 errors and 3 warnings on it. Maybe this could point you in the right direction?
upon a quick skim of your page you don't seem to be utilising CSS properly. That is to say, that I see you are using css but you have elements on your page (use of <center> HTML tags, inline styling and things like that) that go against the grain of why CSS was invented.
If you haven't already seen the CSS zen garden, take a quick read/look at it. It should set you right on why we use CSS instead of tables and alignment tags.
(People sometimes don't get this immediately, but , click the links on the right in the zen garden. The same HTML and page content are completely restyled using one html file and seperate CSS sheets)
Good luck!
Edit:
Oh, I almost forgot to mention that internet explorer 8 doesn't have much (if at all) HTML5 compatibility. If you want to develop websites and web apps in HTML5 you'll be hard pressed to serve your I.E 8 visitors and may end up spending more time fixing bugs than you are developing the content.
Some developers are already boycotting I.E 8 entirely to usher in the new era of the web with HTML5 and CSS 3. There are a few js compatibility libraries out there (like excanvas for the new <canvas> element for example) but they don't work flawlessly and you will eventually have to draw the line somewhere. (lol. canvas.. draw line.. get it?) That being said, i did find this article and this may be useful to you:
turn-on-html5-in-ie8-or-lower
Not every website requires HTML5 and it's new technologies, but if you plan on using it for things like the <canvas> tag, Id suggest (from my own personal opinion) you forget about I.E 8 and concentrate on browsers that utilise it.
Remember that you can make checks in your HTML to see what browser version your visitor is using.
You can see if they are using an incompatible browser, and if so, you can then alert them that their software is out of date and suggest to them alternatives (such as chrome or firefox)
There's a bunch of tutorials on-line about this, here's the first decent looking one I found in a quick Google search this article covers using this technique for seperate CSS sheets but there are others that talk about the problem I mentioned in more depth and I'm sure you can probably figure out how to do it anyway once you read the article.
Either way, I'd say you've got a little bit of reading ahead of you to understand why your humble website does not work in an increasingly obsolete browser.
Again, good luck to you in your future endeavours.
Edit was too harsh:
Having looked a the site I would start by suggesting in future you think about design from a users perspective - the colour scheme you're using isn't very friendly on the eye, the red text against the green is particular troublesome to people with red/green color blindness, you also should consider how your content is presented.
End Edit:
However, regarding your IE issues.
First things first, with any work is getting a firm plan of what you hope to achieve and setting a good groundwork before starting. With HTML that means leveling the playing field with regard to browser quirks, and to achieve that, you use a reset css file.
This ensures that all browsers (as close as possible) behave in more or less the same way, regarding padding, spacing, line heights etc, and can go along way to prevent these sort of problems from happening, and allow you to achieve consitancy.
There's more info at the link below.
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
Secondly your HTML version - your declaring HTML5 but then use HTML4 values and attributes - basically your site (as pointed out above) is not valid markup.
I have a bit of an issue with design where I have a list item that has taken it on itself to be the far higher than the others. I have a feeling this is because of another element in the design.
I use firebug sometimes and chrome developer tools the rest of the time.
These tools can be used to see what the height of something is, or what css styles are effecting the object but what these tools don't do however is show how other objects are effecting other objects.
Has anybody come across a tool which shows the relationship objects in a design are having on each other? Its a long shot, but if there were a place to find out it would be here at SO.
Thanks.
Have a look at webdeveloper available for Chrome and Firefox. This is a very extensive plugin but should be able to do what you need.
Install it > go to the page you want to debug > Cycle trough various Outline options. Start off with "Outline block level elements" and work your way from there.
Do tell me if I misunderstood your question, but with either Firebug or the Chrome Developer Tool, you should be able to inspect the nesting of different elements in your design, and see how a design will look after you delete one of those elements.
The only tricky part is learning how to use those tools, and for that I suggest you watch some youtube videos. For me at least, that's the way I've learned. Unless someone can show you in person, the next best alternative is someone showing you how those tools work through a video.
I know it's easy to get the CSS that is applied to a single node in HTML, using tools like the Firebug extension for Firefox, etc.
But is there a way to see all the CSS that is in effect on an entire page, or a larger fragment of HTML?
Specifically, we are cleaning up our one extremely large CSS file into smaller modules and would like to find out what CSS is used on a certain page, so we can move all the non-used CSS to another module.
Thank you all! These are the various solutions I've looked at now from your recommendations (collected here for people with the same problem):
Dust-Me Selectors (Firefox Add-on)
This does exactly what I need. Lists used and unused CSS selectors (for the current page, or the entire site, after spidering), and can dump both lists as CSV text. Great.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/5392/
CSS Usage (Firefox Add-on)
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/10704/
WARI - Web Application Resource Inspector (Java tool)
Appears to only handle static code, not dynamically generated HTML as is present in most web applications that use ajax – which, unfortunately, makes it useless, at least for me
http://wari.konem.net/
CSS Redundancy Checker (Ruby script, requires Rubygems and Hpricot)
http://code.google.com/p/css-redundancy-checker/
TopStyle (Windows-only application, $79.95 (!!))
http://svanas.dynip.com/topstyle/
These are all cross-platform and free, except for TopStyle.
As far as tools go, you could use the css usage plugin for firebug. It will analyze pages for used css.
Or were you looking for a way to do it more programmaticly?
You can try Dust-Me Selectors, it's add-on for firefox, if you use firebug, as you stated, you may find useful CSS Usage.
I need a tool to compare the design of a website, I do not want to compare the HTML code only, but the output design.
Is this even possible? also is there any opensource program of this kind?
I have searched google, but I only get one candidate so far which is an HTML Match.
In modern webpages the appearance is controlled by various 'things': html code, css styles and images at least (also javascript in some pages). Simple text-based diff programs are not enough because their output can be irrelevant to the webpage appearance (i.e. cleaning up css can show many differences but the rendered webpage remains the same).
For simpler pages HTML Match mentioned above could do the job. If I have to compare the design of two "complex" pages (including layout, space, image and text changes) I would do a two-step approach:
Run a diff tool on the html sources to highlight the textual content differences. Then I would modify one of the pages to show the same content as the other (in order to make the next step more accurate and 'focused' to show 'real' layout changes). Of course it works only with very similar html.
Load the pages in the same web browser, get some screenshots from the rendered output at fixed positions and compare the images (i.e. with ImageMagick). It should show all visual differences in the rendered output.
It is not perfect but should work.
[UPDATE] HTML Match seems dead, see this answer for an alternative solution.
Solution: “compare web pages” tool. (“We've been doing it since 1999. It's free.”)
Example output (comparing pages for TP-Link USB hub model UH700 and UH720):
Under windows:
http://www.htmlmatch.com/
If you are using KDE, you can use Kompare or KDiff3.
However, if you want to view how your web page looks in different browsers in different operating systems, BrowserShots can used.
There are these online tools - that aren't brilliant:
http://www.w3.org/2007/10/htmldiff
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/diff/
I like the look of daisydiff but have not used it in anger: http://code.google.com/p/daisydiff/
The keyword you're looking for is "diff".
A good program that can show you the differences between two files (html markup or other) would be ExamDiff for windows.
I'm working on one and i tell you it's hard and there is nothing on the market. Maybe Google and Bing have something inhouse. You can use some image comparison tools which identify rectangle regions of changed images. This is for example a part of all modern video compression but you have to do it for different regions of the webpage (the nav bar section, the main article, the region filtered by an ad-blocker etc.) as some of them may change and it's still considered the same content on the page.
As i said very complex problem with no exact solution.
The other is going the non visual way and just compare the resulting computed computer styles of each html element. You have to hack the browser to get access to the layout tree. There is also no official API or existing library/program/hack/patch for it.
You can make a visual comparison with Araxis Merge Pro by taking screen output with systems like BrowserStack, Cross Browser, PhantomJS