I have started work in a class for school where the professor give us a few images of a webpage and asks us to replicate it with certain constraints. The first assignment is to create the web page with nothing but HTML and CSS, I know the basics of both and was wondering this:
When faced with a font/shading of text what is the best way to go about replicating it in CSS? The title bar has some formatting that I do not know where to even begin replicating.
Secondly can you, with html, make a horizontal table and fill it with images?
The easiest way is to copy the site and stylesheet and perhaps javascript and say here it is, but that may be cheating :-)
When faced with a font/shading of text what is the best way to go about replicating it in CSS?
There is the text-shadow property, but not all browsers support it. You can always use images or just drop the text-shadow requirement.
The title bar has some formatting that I do not know where to even begin replicating.
Rightmouse clikc inspect element and see how it is done. This is for Chrome. For FF you would have to install FireBug.
Secondly can you, with html) make a horizontal table and fill it with images?
Yes you can and no you shouldn't. Tables should be used for tabular data and you are using it for layout. Use CSS and perhaps divs when needed.
When faced with a font/shading of text what is the best way to go about replicating it in CSS?
CSS3 provides several properties to deal with text formatting, such as text-shadow and #font-face.
Secondly can you (with html) make a horizontal table and fill it with images?
Yes, why not? If I understand you correctly, you're looking for a single row table, i.e., a single <tr> with <td>s inside, each one containing an <img> element. But beware: if you want the table just to layout the images side-by-side, it's bad practice. You should just add all <img> one after another, or use display: inline or inline-block, or use floats.
Related
I have a couple of questions about the problem of hiding text inside an anchor tag and only displaying a background image.
Note to those about to bombard me with links to other articles and tell me that this is a repeat question: I have scoured this site and the web in general and read the solutions (and by solutions I mean mostly hacks) people came up with. What most people seem to be doing (or have done up until recently) was the -9999px hack. Also popular is/was wrapping the text in a span and doing something like this or visibility: hidden.
Now, I personally think that "hiding" the text would really only make sense in the first place if it was hidden dynamically, i.e. displayed only if the background image wasn't loading (for whatever reason). However, all the "solutions" I found effectively remove the text completely or at least hide it permanently so even if the background image isn't loaded, the text still wouldn't be displayed.
So here are my questions:
Why would one want to have text and then permanently hide it at all? Why not just leave the anchor empty - i.e. just don't put any text in it - and only have the image displayed? Why have text and then go through the headache of figuring out how to hide it? What's the point of that? Am I missing something here?
Now that we have CSS3, are there actual non-hacky, dynamic ways to hide text when the background image is displayed and have the text appear when the image - for whatever reason - fails to load? I couldn't find any resources so I am assuming this is not supported but maybe one of you ninjas knows better?
There are different possibilities why to do that:
Search Engines scan the web and also gather content that is visually hidden. The site gets better in terms of semantics and has a higher page rank.
Many visually impaired people rely on content that's read to them by screenreaders. Sometimes text in the alt-tag is just not enough. Background images don't even have such a tag.
To your second question:
To me there is no known way to check if a background-image is successfully loaded and is also shown (a totally different story!). CSS only styles content according to defined rules. There may be a javascript way to do it, but in my opinion it isn't worth the cost because mostly this text isn't really a fallback. It has a different purpose as stated above.
I have got a requirement where the outlook is as shown in the attached image
I have accomplished the task by making use of tables in HTML and styling using CSS.
The criteria is that the images in a row is almost the same (i.e the two images) and the content changes for every row. So the content is different on every row but the images remain the same for every row. Just for info there will be multiple number of rows. What would be the best practice to implement such as design other than using tables, where it should also be flexible to change the content. Or using tables is the best option.
Suggestions from the professionals are appreciated.
I don't want to write it for you but I've made a quick mock up for you to have a look at - http://jsfiddle.net/spacebeers/TAJdw/
You don't want to use tables for anything other than tabular date anymore. You're much better off spending your time researching CSS.
Have a look at my example. It's what one instance of a content container could look like. What you want to do from there is look at getting two of them in a row. Build the CSS for the .container class, then copy another instance of .contentContainer in and see what results you get.
I'm happy to provide help if you want but it's always good to have a crack at it yourself. You'll get better answers on here and avoid unnecessary downvoting of your question.
It is generally advisable to use pure css for things like this, rather than tables. Tables cause your page to render slower, as the content needs to be loaded before the rendering engine can correctly draw them.
Try something like this
I would consider using a div with a background image style to it so that for each row with the same image all you will need to do is put that specific div class in. Then you can just position the outer div's to get it to look correctly, although tables are not the most efficient way of build web pages they still work.
Like mez said - you need to think about repeating content - and learning about floats. I'd really advise working through this site
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/floatutorial/
it will teach you all the basics of designing with divs.
In the meantime - here's roughly what your're after. I've added background colours and made up all the heights and widths, as they weren't specifie, but it should get you started.
If you look at the html, I've annotated what is just a repeat of earlier content.
http://jsfiddle.net/zandergrin/k8EsP/3/
Right now, we are trying to achieve consistent formatting of textarea elements, across Safari/Chrome/Firefox/IE on Mac and Windows. I believe this may be a rabbit hole, since any combination thereof could produce formatting in a slightly different way -- maybe one combination adds a bit of padding to a div here differently than the others, another one breaks multi-line text there differently than the others, and so on.
Instead of using textarea (or div) elements, can we achieve pixel-perfect positioning using HTML5's canvas? Or using the Raphael JavaScript library? Or maybe some other JS library?
Mainly, by pixel-perfect, what I mean is any arbitrary text should get rendered in the exact same way (especially with respect to line breaks and padding) in any of the above-mentioned browsers.
(I'd prefer to avoid Flash-based solutions for the moment, unless that is the only solution...)
Send the text to the server, have the server render an image, display the image. Voilà.
I would say this is nearly impossible.
I would also say that there is no reason to have pixel perfect across all browsers because the overwhelming majority of visitors only view your site with one browser. And those who do visit your site in more than one browser (say at work and at home) are unlikely to notice elements that are off a few pixels or have slightly different border colors.
What we should be concerned about is that the content looks good in each browser.
That said, here's a great list of textarea tricks: http://css-tricks.com/6841-textarea-tricks/
One main reason that PDF exists is that browsers are not about pixel-identical layout but PDF is. Among other things, not even typefaces are guaranteed to be the same from one OS/browser to the next.
Even, if you don't let the browser position anything and you do all your own pixel level positioning, you still won't necessarily have the same fonts to work with. If you let the browser position anything, then you can have variations.
Would one solution be to begin your css with a clean slate? Give everything a known default?
For example, I start my css files like this so I always know what to expect:
*{
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
Is that what you're looking for? Similarly, you could change '*' to 'textarea'.
I'm not sure if it is possible, however one thing you may want to look into is using the web developer toolbar for firefox or the web developer add-on for chrome. There is an option to disable browser default styles. Check this and then style everything. The borders, border type, all margins, paddings, background colors, etc. Then reenable browser default styles and make sure it looks the same. If not, wash, rinse and repeat.
Also, if fonts play a part, you will have to embed them into the page since some operating systems may not have a particular font installed.
When designing my homepage, I feel like the common knowledge is that it is bad to just have one big picture in the center that gives all of the content. The "right" way to do it would be to chop up the large layed out image into several small backgrounds and make the text use standard html with css background images for layout.
Is the only reason one big image is bad SEO reasons?
A search engine can't make sense of it.
A blind or otherwise visually-impaired person can't make sense of it.
Someone blocking images because he's on a mobile phone with expensive internet can't make sense of it.
There are a few reasons :-)
Also important:
Changes are not easily made to whole, pre-composited images, unless you still have access to the original layered variants. And hopefully they contain text as well, not just pixel data. (Mentioned by others before already. Credits go to pierre and Kendrick)
If you're using background images don't forget to set a text and background color too. Otherwise people not seeing any images might have a hard time deciphering your text (black on black isn't nice to read :-))
You can still use one large image as background. How the text is layed out above that is another matter entirely. In fact, chopping up the image and piecing the pieces together is painful using CSS too. In my experience it's best and easiest to leave background images unchopped and instead composite the rest of the layout above them, using other images or backgrounds if needed. This gives you a little more flexibility when changing a layout again, too.
SEO is one. Handicapped accessibility is another big one -- a screen reader can't read text within an image, typically. Page load time is another one; a user with a slow connection won't see anything useful while the image loads. Lastly, many browsers will use multiple connections to request resources such as images, so they can be loaded simultaneously. If there's just one image, only one connection can be used.
Updating will be tedious; you can also no longer rely on many benefits of CSS.
It's also bad for accessibility (screen readers, text-resizing, different monitor sizes)
It also removes your ability to easily edit text content.
I certainly wouldn't do it if you're looking for a web-developer job, but if you really don't care about the above, you won't be the first person to do it...
I see no reason at all in using imagea to represent something what can easily be achieved with HTML and CSS.
You're putting up a web site to enable communication between you and your visitors. Images and Flash prevent that.
Generally, you design a site with HTML/CSS and text. Only when you wish to add some design that cannot be expressed with standard means, then you use images. But have your site degrade gracefully for those who cannot or does not wish to see images. Let images be an addition, like an advanced version, in no case a replacement for text.
The discussion on this answer to the question "How can I use Google's new imageless button?" Has prompted this question.
Google seems to think that going imageless is good for some reason, but from the comments cited, I fail to see the advantage. Is it worth it to send dozens of lines of HTML and who knows how much CSS to render these imageless buttons, rather than simply load another image, especially when techniques like CSS sprites are available?
When would this technique be preferred? The other question asks how it can be done, but I want to know why it should be done.
Localization (it's easier to translate text than images)
Skinning/themeing (it's easier to change the look and feel with single CSS than recreate multiple images)
Accessibility (screen readers can read properly, text scaling works properly)
Performance (the CSS is shared and so is loaded once from the server)
Functionality (it's easier to expand the button with new UX elements like dropdown arrow when you don't have to change the whole picture)
Btw, the "imageless" button might as well contain an image inside the visual template. This approach is quite similar to XAML's approach to templating and styling the visual tree.
I think in this specific case I can only see the advantage that the buttons can be programatically generated. If you don't know what your button will say it's probably easy to make this way than generating it using somekind of image library generator.
Also changing one CSS can make you change the look-and-feel of all buttons at once. Using image buttons you'll need to update everyone and each of images.
Isn't this done because the height of the button may vary (for example the text size)?
The page load is smoother as no images have to be loaded and will appear later than the rest
The button text is also readable in the case somebody cannot read/view images, yet you have the graphical look. (building a graphical button with images in the traditional way around real text is as complicated HTML as this method)
As they mentioned in their blog, these buttons are skinnable without creating and storing custom images.
Basically, you get all the advantages of plain text buttons over custom imaging, while still having a nice, skinnable graphical look.