I am a Web developer and in my projects I have noticed that my weakest point is not being good at the front-end design. Relying on other designers can be annoying if they are not able to produce as quickly as I want.
My perspective on HTML/CSS is that it is basically a big hack that amazingly works. There are too many CSS and browser specific bugs/quirks to learn and remember them all without spending extreme amounts of time trying to untangle everything. Is there a fast track route to getting CSS into my brain? I have looked at some CSS books, but to me they really read as long lists of how to render things correctly in IE6 and how to make corners rounded. (Seriously why does it require so many tricks to make a sharp corner round? On any platform but the Web this would be called a major oversight.)
Does there exist something that does the analogous to CSS that jQuery does for JavaScript? Using jQuery you don't need to know JavaScript well to make things that work.
I am not interested in learning why IE6 does things in weird ways because I don't care about supporting it at all. I am more interested in a method of learning how to use CSS to do what I want without spending hours and hours reading obscure blogs.
Pencil and paper to sketch out your ideas (think in boxes, not triangles or hexagons), then just break down all the little parts and learn how to do each one. No problem is too big that it can't be broken down. And, like always, TMTOWTDI!
Find examples and learn from it—at least that's how I started learning. Study the styles used and play around with them. When you find something that does what you like, create a mock-up and play around with it. Then test it for cross-browser compatibility.
If you get frustrated because something works in Firefox and Chrome, but not in IE (this will happen a lot), don't give up. I find cursing Bill Gates' name and all he stands for is a great stress reliever. :-)
A great tool I like to use is Firebug, a plugin for Firefox that allows you to, among a great many other things, edit CSS rules in-browser and see the results as soon as you do it.
I agree that CSS was kind of an afterthought in the web design world, but it's one hell of an invention and makes things so much easier and quicker to develop.
Yes, there are CSS frameworks that are the 'jQuery of CSS'. Some of the more popular ones include 960 and Blueprint. I personally use 960 and have found it takes a lot of the guesswork out of layout.
As others have said CSS is hard to learn by reading. It ends up being one of those things you just need to develop an instinct for through lots of experience (which typically means lots of trial, error, and frustration). It is, as you've highlighted, not an ideal situation, but it is what it is.
Another difficulty is that the methodologies or workflow that is employed can really differ between individuals. Some people do a mock-up in Photoshop first, then produce an exact pixel-by-pixel "rendering" with HTML/CSS. Others use Photoshop, Illustrator, or another tool to simply sketch out and idea, and then re-create it from scratch in HTML/CSS. And still others prefer to start directly with HTML/CSS and just a few thumbnail sketches. Figuring out which of these methods fits you best is anthoer important piece of the puzzle.
It pretty much takes time and practice. But you can save yourself a lot of trouble if you keep your html clean and straightforward. Here are a few rules I can think of that have helped me:
Use DOCTYPE in your html pages, start with transitional since it has the most lax rules, and validate your html. If you keep your page in standards mode rather than quirks mode, you will have significantly fewer problems across the board.
Pick what browsers you will support early on and support them in a logical order. For me, I develop in firefox, then make sure that things are solid on chrome / safari. IE can use a special kind of comment that lets you insert html visible only to IE. Use that to add on stylesheets for IE7, then IE6 to override styles and fix any display issues in those browsers. You should generally start with the best browser first and work your way backward.
Be careful with padding. That is one of the most problematic properties I've dealt with. When you can, opt for using a little sub-container element with a margin in place of padding. It's more markup but margin is handled much better across all browsers.
Absolute-positioned elements inside of relative-positioned elements. This solves a LOT. When you relative position an element, it stays in it's normal flow. When you absolute position elements inside of a parent that is relative, the absolute items work in reference to the location of the parent.
In this case I don't think books will help much. CSS is extremely easy to learn, and extremely difficult to master.
All I can suggest is learn as you go.. You need a lot of experience!
Or, you can drop support for IE7 and especially IE6. If you do that you'll find very very few and very very rare quirks :)
Take some classes in graphic design. No programming language will make you an artist, and artistry is required for good user-interface design.
[or you could find better graphic designers to work with]
Subscribe to css-discuss, play with the common problems and talk with other people about your progress. The wiki is a very useful resource too.
Related
What is the point of these CSS Frameworks? I don't understand them. When I look at them, all I see is boring layouts that seem overbearingly-difficult to adapt to your own unique designs.
Is this the case, or am I just missing something here? I'm referring to (frameworks in general) things like Blueprint, Less, Skeleton, 960 Grid system, Base, Gridless, etc etc etc.
I know this is a really simple thing but I just don't get it. I have searched but have not found anything that helps me to understand what the big deal is. When I look at their code, all I see is mess. Weird class and id names all over the place.
(This isn't a rant or complaint by the way, I just really don't get it.)
CSS frameworks are pre-prepared software frameworks that are meant to
allow for easier, more standards-compliant web design using the
Cascading Style Sheets language. Most of these frameworks contain at
least a grid. More functional frameworks also come with more features
and additional JavaScript based functions, but mostly design
orientated and unobtrusive. This differentiates these from functional
and full JavaScript frameworks. -Wikipedia
Advantages
They can help you learn CSS. You might just literally not know how to pull off a solid multi-column layout. A framework may be a
good place to get your feet wet understanding how CSS works.
They provide code that you just don't need to write from scratch every time, like resets. I've long been a proponent that the star
selector (*) margin/padding reset is a fine reset. I use it all the
time. But... if you are starting a major new project that is going
to be loads of pages, live for years and years, and will grow over
time, you should invest right away in a more robust reset. All
these frameworks start with brilliant resets that cover all the
bases and will have you covered for years to come.
They relieve cross-browser concerns. You can't undervalue this. We've all felt the burn of finding out our sites are borked
in some browser or another at a hugely inopportune time. Frameworks
are built to bring their magic to all browsers.
It helps you build good habits. Like including a print stylesheet in your projects. I always intend to build one, and I
often do, but the chances are a lot higher that I do it if I have
one there from the get-go.
They encourage grid based design. Which is a good thing. Grids don't mean boring! They just help you achieve better
readability, scanability, balance visual weight, flexibity,
expandability, and just overall page page cohesiveness.
They come with documentation. If you need help getting started, framework generally come with some support files. This can be
particularly nice if you are designing a site you will be handing
off to a client. You can just let them know what framework you used
and refer them to that documentation for support requests.
They lay groundwork. If you are using something like YUI, your life will be a lot easier if you use All-YUI-Stuff-All-The-Time.
It's built to work together and built for expandability.
CSS-Tricks
Also see: Comparison of CSS frameworks
I've recently been going over some HTML and CSS stuff to get more into web development, I have been designing sites on and off for a while now and I would love to start actually developing some.
I've seen Bootstrap mentioned so many times all over the internet and I was wondering if someone could help me out and point me in the right direction... I've been learning the fundamentals of HTML/CSS and as I understand it, Bootstrap is a html/css UI framework?
I have my own UI designs in a PSD file, how would I get them to work within Bootstrap?
Is it a matter of slicing up my images and adding custom CSS into Bootstrap?
I know that I am a long way off from this, but this is the type of stuff I want to be doing:
http://heyflat.com/themes/todo/index.html
If you can point me towards the type of stuff I should be learning in order to get there I would much appreciate it, so far I will continue with my html/css stuff but I would love to start using Bootstrap and customizing it seems essential to me for what I would like to be able to achieve...
Thank you for reading :)
Updated
Overall, my process has not changed much except for how I think about converting PSDs to HTML and CSS. I look forward to the day I discover a tool as flexible and comfortable as Photoshop that can output directly to good HTML and CSS. That day has yet to come to me. Here's the process I follow, utilizing Photoshop and Bootstrap.
I find that Photoshop is a great way to imagine, share and iterate over a visual design because it frees me to experiment in ways that are currently either impossible or too time consuming to realize just with HTML and CSS.
Once a design is agreed upon, I begin planning how the target design will be realized with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
I consider the browsers of my target audience. For example, IE8-, does not support rounded borders. If IE8- users are a large portion of my audience and those rounded borders are critical to the design I may take the time to slice out images and add extra HTML and CSS.
I decide if I am going to use a framework like bootstrap. Browser support must also be considered when deciding on a framework. If a framework has examples like bootstrap then I can checkout those examples in various browsers. If using a framework then I commit to doing it their way. That is, I use their grid system, html and class names for everything. I only add my own when the framework cannot meet a specific need. I do augment their classes as needed using a separate stylesheet but always in appropriate, low risk ways, bootstrap encourages this. I will probably never augment the grid system except perhaps through their customizer, but I have never needed to do that.
Next I implement the design. I may find that some elements need to be sliced out of the PSD, but most, like drop shadows, rounded borders and gradients, can be rendered using CSS. Some aspects of the PSD may need to be tweaked to accommodate responsive behavior or to make implementation simpler. As has always been the case, I target standards compliant browsers first and adjust for the others later. One of the nice parts about a good framework is that there is usually very little that needs tweaked.
I review the document at various resolutions in browsers my target audience use, and consider and implement additional tradeoffs as needed. For example, if it is not critical that those rounded corners show up in IE8- then I will keep it simple, render them using CSS, and let IE8- alone. I still verify that it looks acceptable in IE8 and IE7.
Steps 4 and 5 are generally not sequential but steps I bounce back and forth on. Also, make sure your client is on board or you can get them on board with how you are supporting various (not-so-modern) browsers and your reasons for doing so (shorter load times, less development time, easier maintenance, and so on).
Bootstrap 2 examples: http://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/getting-started.html#examples
Bootstrap 3 examples: http://getbootstrap.com/getting-started/#examples
I've been using XHTML for about 3 years now, and didn't care much about HTML5 and CSS3 arrival. Several months ago I've stumbled upon HTML5 Boilerplate and I'm starting to get very interested in it right now.
The only thing I can't find yet is drawbacks of using this set of best practices. I know, that the main goal of it to make site look the same on wide variety of browsers, but is there something I should be aware about?
Is there something I should be aware about?
Yes, definitely. It's not a plug-and-play thing. Or at least, it could be like that but it hasn't been conceived for that. And if you use it this way you can't enjoy its best. Boilerplate is very flexible and you have to learn how to customize it. Full stop.
My personal suggestion is to start experimenting with it and study the features it has to offer. Luckily for us it's well documented and you can learn a lot. Not only the boilerplate itself, but also the rules and best practices about HTML5, CSS3, resources loading and related issues/workarounds on performances, browsers quirks and how to fix them, tricks for mobile development, polyfills and conditional loading and a lot of other crazy stuffs. Once you are aware of its possibilities, if you'll find drawbacks you'll be able to customize the base boilerplate.
Start from here, read the docs, follow every link and don't be tempted to take shortcuts. It takes time, but you'll be rewarder very well. If you have troubles ask.
For something more concrete, a drawback I found very quickly (but someone consider this a plus) is that the boilerplate doesn't provide a CSS grid. Not a huge problem, I discovered that adapt.js is easily integrable, so I replaced normalize.css with adapt.js's reset stylesheet and used the grid.
Two things I noticed couple months back is the way javascript gets loaded at the bottom of the body. I'm not a big fan of this if not only it looks dirty. Also I tested the loading myself and didn't notice any better loading of javascript. In fact it ran a couple ms slower on a huge script.
Also the normalize.css I tried couple of times but found myself restyling more paddings and margins than before. Which is normal ofcourse since it's goal is somewhat similar but a different approach. I changed this to Eric Meyer's reset.css just because I'm used to it.
I really like the modernizr script and the way to implement things for x-browser results.
Google Analytics implementation for example.
Another small thing I remember was the placing of the title tag. I changed it to the top position for SEO reasons.
Let me begin this topic by explaining my background experience with web design. I have always been more of a back end programmer, with PHP and SQL and things. However I do have a shallow background with HTML and CSS. The problem is, I don't know it all. What I do know is, when it comes to designing (not back end dirty work) I understand basic CSS properties and I also understand HTML and I can usually throw together a sloppy web page with the two and a couple bazillion DIV tags.
Anyways..
The problem I always have encountered is that when I design a website in a browser such as IE7 (and then it looks perfect on IE7), and then look at it on IE8 or IE6 or Mozilla (etc.) it gets all spacey and ugly and looks totally different than the way it should look on IE7.
Question one:
Basically, what I am asking everyone is what route should I take to learn how to properly build the website? Build as in put it togehter with CSS standards and HTML standards that will make my site look the same on every brwoser. (Not only learning standards but where can I learn to properly write my code?) Where is a strong free resource I can use to learn how to these things?
Question two:
How do I properly code my website? Do I use all external style sheets to make dynamic page design simplistic or do I hard code some things into the DIV tags on each page? What is proper?
Oh, and if anyone has any tutorials on how to properly design a complete layout feel free to throw it in a response somewhere.
Thank you for taking the time to read my questions, and hopefully you will understand what I am trying to get out to everyone. I need to get on the right route of the designing side of web programming so that I will know how to create successful websites in the future.
Thank you,
Sam Pardee
First, I recommend NOT starting with IE as your "development" browser. Start in Firefox, say (which gives you the advantage of tools such as Firebug and the web developer toolbar), and then get it right in IE afterwards.
Second, definitely user external style sheets; it results in much cleaner code and a much simpler way to make style updates. Definitely recommended. Also external CSS files can be cached by the browser, so they won't increase the page download size as users go from page to page in your site or application.
Lastly, start by defining your content using simple HTML, basing the structure on the meaning of the content (often called "semantic" HTML), not on how you want it to look. Use a <ul> tag for something that is a list of items, for example, even if you don't want to display it as a "bullet list" (the default styling for <ul>). Then start adding styles to make it look right. This will result in very clean HTML that can support a variety of formats and layouts (take a look at CSS Zen Garden to see what I mean) and will also help push you towards a layout that reflects the structure of your content, which will be easier to read and comprehend.
In terms of books, you can't go wrong with Eric Meyer. HTML is easy, of course, and I don't recommend doing fancy stuff with HTML, so put your learning effort into CSS (Eric is the CSS guru).
Cross-browser compatibility is always an issue. It's a staple of web development, sadly, and there is no magic bullet. Luckily, the main offender, IE6, is finally starting to fade.
A1.
When starting work on a new site, first take every piece of content that needs to be on the page and paste it into a text file. Then put it in a rational order (thinking "If I had to use a text browser to use this page, how would I want it to be arranged...").
Then start wrapping HTML tags around each piece of content. For each piece, think "What type of information is this?" A heading? h1/h2/etc tags. A paragraph? A quote? A table? p,quote,table. Essentially, use HTML tags that describe what kind of information each piece of content is. When I do this, I pay no attention to how it actually looks in the browser at this point.
Once the content is all marked up, begin writing the CSS. If at all possible, try not to touch the markup during this step. Sometimes that isn't possible, though, and throwing a div or span around some elements is unavoidable. The less meaningless markup, the better.
In my experience, this approach keeps things very clean and tidy, and makes debugging layout issues a lot easier.
A2.
Building the styles into your markup using the "style" attribute is fine for prototyping, but beware, the temptation to leave them there once it works is strong. The best practice is to have all of your styles in external stylesheets. I'm interested to hear any alternative viewpoints.
Some great web standards/CSS resources:
http://www.csszengarden.com/
http://www.alistapart.com/
http://www.thenoodleincident.com/
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html (useful reference for selector-compatibility)
http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/ (good reference for css hack compatibility)
http://www.zeldman.com/
http://meyerweb.com/
Hope this helps!
There are TOO many site out there that have really great tutorials for HTML and CSS. They will give you all of the information you are asking for. I would start doing some reading of the great gurus of HTML/CSS:
Simon Collison
Andy Budd
Molly Holschzag
Dan Cederholm
Jason Santa Maria
Eric Meyer
Jeffrey Zeldman
Cameron Moll
Any book or article you can fond from these folks will steer you in the right direction; you can't go wrong!
As for sites that will give you the proper methods/concepts/training for web standards compliant sites:
http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp
http://www.webstandards.org/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://www.webdesignpractices.com/
http://www.designmeltdown.com/default.aspx
http://www.cameronmoll.com/
http://www.alistapart.com/
http://www.cssnewbie.com/
http://www.css3.com/
http://htmldog.com/
http://css-tricks.com/
http://simplebits.com/
http://www.colly.com/
http://glish.com/css/#tutorials
http://meyerweb.com/
http://jasonsantamaria.com/
The one of the best books I've bought so far to help with HTML and CSS coding PROPERLY is Beginning CSS Web Development by Simon Collison. Great, easy to understand, and not too slow. Great examples to follow along. After that, buy CSS Mastery - Advanced Web Standards Solutions, also by Simon Collison, and Andy Budd and Cameron Moll. This book gets you up to speed with some advanced techniques that you'll see on the many of the web sites right now, some of which were invented by the authors.
I'm looking for feedback on peoples experiences with developing sites that work across browsers. It seems to me there are at least two obvious ways to approach the task of making your site/webapp work across browser:
Constantly test across all supported browsers every step of the way; or
Pick a browser, get everything working in it as a reference implementation and then make all the other browsers match the reference implementation.
Each approach has an obvious drawback -- the problem with #1 is that you end up doing a lot of unnecessary work -- especially if you are developing a webapp that is going through a lot of iterations/prototyping/spikes etc. You will make a bunch of stuff work across browsers that will subsequently be discarded/removed.
The disadvantage to approach #2 is that while it makes the initial development much quicker and more painful it makes it much harder to figure out where some of the specific errors arose, especially for more complex issues -- whereas if you had been developing for all browsers at once you should catch it right away and know what change(s) introduced the problems.
A somewhat obvious third option would be a hybrid approach, but it seems to me that you would end up losing more by experiencing both of the problems with #1 and #2 than you would gain from the benefits of doing both.
What have you found to be the most effective way(s) to approach this challenge?
I’ve found that if you get too deep into developing a website without looking at other browsers you’ll quickly get to a place that is too much of a headache to debug. I consistently open my web pages in all the browsers I care about.
I strongly suggest you verify all browsers each time you make a large change to the site.
Make it work with all browsers up front. This will mean extra testing during development but will cause you less pain later. I find it's usually easier to diagnose problems if I've just developed the thing, rather than coming back later and trying to figure it out...along with a list of other issues.
It partly depends on whether you know it's going to have to work in all browsers up front. If you do, then you really are better off just making it cross-browser to begin with. You don't need to test that everything is 100% compliant every step of the way, but you should code toward that.
And really, it's not that hard, especially what with JS frameworks like jQuery and Dojo around that take care of the scutwork. If you find yourself continually battling one browser or another, you might want to reconsider your design, as you may have chosen to do things in a way that is inherently more difficult to do when cross-browser compatibility is important.
Well, you do #1, but you do it whilst greating a style guide. A litle bit like this: http://www.sitefromscratch.com/content/html-xhtml-css-testing.
So when designing a new site or design, you create a page containing the desired HTML for all the visual elements that will be used on your site. Ignore style for now, just use the HTML that makes the most sense.
Then you style it. Preferably, your style guide would be all on 1 page so it can be open in each browser you're supporting and all you need to do is hit refresh between changes, (avoid opting for several pages, because it will take you longer to inspect them all).
When you build your site, build from the style guide. If it's not in the style guide, add it and test it there first. If you discover a problem when building the site, (perhaps you didn't consider a particular element when it wrapped, for example), replicate and fix the problem in the style guide.
Here's the killer advantage: A new version of one of your supported browsers is released, what would you prefer to test, your entire site, or the style guide?
So that's the CSS taken care of, now you need to do that all over with your generic JS functions, if any.
I created an interface compatibility layer between the browser and my code - basically, I wrapped certain functionality and made the wrappers determine what javascript/html was needed.
As browsers change, you change this compatibility layer and you can leave the rest of your code alone.
If you have this layer in your architecture, the answer to your question becomes "whenever you want".
If you can get an enterprise lock-in then multiple browser support can become less of an issue, e.g. if your customers are all companies using Internet Explorer then why build the site to look good in Safari or Chrome?
If though you are making something for the general public then there is a hybrid approach I'd use which is that I use one browser to get all the functionality there and working and then test across browsers when I'm in that "pretifying" phase of the project. Initially the key is for it to work, then it has to look good.
I don't think I could see a logic to testing across all browsers as I initially fill out a form or do some other basic functionality as it could be a big productivity drain to test across at least a few browsers, e.g. IE 6 & 7, Firefox 2 and 3, Opera 9.5, Safari, and Chrome if one wants to get all the big boys, and at least a couple O/S as Safari on a Mac can be different than Safari on Windows, which is a lot of tests even for just one or two pages. On the other hand, near the end, this is when I can refactor my CSS and inline styling and make the code better for handing off for someone else to maintain, archive until a service pack project is planned, or keep some documents just in case something has to be done. Also, by waiting to clean things up, I can have more confidence in the final UI parts as these can evolve and change considerably over a short period of time.
I usually start out ensuring that all the HTML and controls that I write/use adhere to the specification.
Tools-->Options-->Text Editor-->HTML-->Validation-->Check Show Errors and choose your Target
This starts me out on a solid base. I functionally test new features in a single browser and then about once/twice a day test the full set of them across all browsers.
Using this approach, CSS and JS are the usual suspects when something isn't right, its rare that it's the actual HTML markup.
If you can do it right the first time. Do it then. It will probably never be right later.
Depends mostly on your experience, which could be applied to any programming activity including this one. If you know in advance what likely pitfalls you're going to have to avoid (eg. in cross-browser development, don't make it hard on yourself by trying to do something that is going to be a hassle in a different browser), then you can probably safely develop everything in one browser and then go in after it's done and tweak things to get it working everywhere.
I usually advise junior developers to keep all browsers open during development and to refresh each browser when making changes, but I myself tend to write everything with Firebug for support and then go back and see how it's doing in IE7 (etc) afterwards. Since I've been doing this for several years, most of the time I can predict what's going to be causing a headache and often immediately know where to look to fix it.
If you are new to Web Design/Development then getting things right in different browsers can be a chore at times.
However, it's really not that hard to get a website working in every major browser and coded towards the W3C standard. In my opinion EVERY designer/developer should do this out of principle, otherwise they are no better than they were in the IE years.
Develop cross-browser code, make sure it validates and never think about designing for one browser again.