The Separation of Layout and Content is the domain of CSS and HTML - so far well understood. Now about separating...
I'm looking for hints and Best Practices to get started with the task of providing a "skin" or "theme" for a content management system.
Background:
We are starting to embrace a Portal Server/Content Management System and are starting to change the look and feel to match our needs.
Our designer has so far mainly worked with full control over HTML and CSS, tweaking either one in order to get pixelperfect layout. With adoption of the cms there's a lot precreated HTML (very semantic, almost no tables :) that needs to be skinned with CSS and Images. Though it is possible to change the HTML fragments, I'd prefer to do so only as a last resort.
As this provides the challenge of "how to get started" my question is about any tipps how to proceed or articles that can help managing or organizing this task - e.g. best practices in designing, how to slice this task or what tool to use.
It seems bad practice to just save a dynamically generated page to disk and make changes locally. This would be somewhat ok for the CSS files but changes to HTML elements must be retrofitted to the fragments that they are generated from. I'd like to keep this out of the designer's realm if possible. Also, the thought of Dreamweaver (or any similar tool) making implicit tweaks to the HTML structure is frightening for me.
For the curious: The mentioned CMS/Portalserver is Liferay, but the question is really language- and tool-agnostic.
Edit: FireBug (as Josh suggested) is awesome for trying on-the-fly changes to css. Is there more - either in the area of tools or in-process and self-organization?
If you're looking for practical examples of separating style and content, then I'd suggestion the CSS Zen Garden. Trawling through the HTML and CSS is inspirational and enlightening and should help with what you're trying to do.
My #1 tip would be be to make everything as semantic as possible and use lots of classes and ids to hook your styles onto.
Usually, Whenever I am in a situation Like this, I bring up the page in FireFox, inspect the different elements using FireBug and see exactly what css is applied to them. THen I'l just modify the existing css until I get what I like. You can even play around in firebug and modify the CSS without "saving" those changes.
Have look at CSS Tidy, we normally use this to clean up the CSS and reorganise for development and production. However, I personally prefer writing HTML/CSS by hand before using this. It is just a matter of individual preference I guess.
Related
I have used HTML in its basic form, and I mainly work on "server side" (of Enterprise application, mainly based in Java EE).
From what I understand, HTML is the "pages" which we see in an browser (that source code which a GUI developer writes and which a browser renders appropriately).
For example in an HTML tag, we write "h1" element, and the browser displays the text within as bold.
Now why there is any need of css? From what I am aware of, CSS is used to give "style" to a html page. The confusion that I have, doesn't HTML in itself able to give the style? what were the compelling reasons for creation of css?
Can anyone help me understand this in simple words.
The code that you put in your html to style it is actually CSS. HTML actually has some built in CSS. So really, you are using CSS when you do that. Also people like to connect a separate file for CSS in bigger projects. It looks more organized, and it easier to keep track of. It is also easier to code the CSS, because it is less messy and it seems like you have a bit more functionality. In conclusion, the code in the html that you are using to style with, is actually CSS, just built in. Also, I would highly recommend separating your stylesheet and HTML file(the stylesheet is CSS). If you need help, go to codecademy and create an account. Take the HTML and CSS lesson. I found this very useful and is where I learned most of my knowledge. I would highly recommend going to that site also. The site is also free.
Could someone suggest me any good beginners guide on how to create web pages from scratch (slice a psd) using divs. I have html and css knowledge but have never created any page from scratch in any way div/table/html5
Start by mimicking a simple page. This is called a "cleanroom" exercise, and is great for improving your HTML and CSS skills and actually making it possible to transfer design and layout ideas from your mind into code.
Here's how you do it:
Pick a page whose design you like and looks simple enough. For example, the logged out page at flickr.com.
Take a screenshot of it; do not look at the HTML/CSS code at all
Create a replica of it using your own HTML and CSS from scratch
You may use a color picker to find what colors they use
Try mimicking the fonts and distances manually, without looking at their rules; this will help you get a better understanding of page layout rules and typography rules.
Make sure your final HTML validates, preferably as XHTML 1.0 Strict (that's stricter than HTML5 and compatible with HTML5)
Also validate your CSS
Using the browser of your choice (e.g. Firefox 4 which is good at rendering things according to standards), check if your result is the same pixel-by-pixel.
Resize your website and see if it behaves the same as the original.
Ask a more experienced developer whether your HTML code is semantically correct. This will help you determine whether you've used the correct tags for the correct meaning.
This assignment will take you a long time the first time you do it, but if you're an experienced developer, it won't usually take more than a couple of minutes or up to an hour per page. It may become frustrating at times, but it's a great way to improve your skills. While doing it, make sure you look at references such as http://www.htmldog.com/ for the HTML/CSS language syntax.
I know that is a very embracing question, but I have just started with Ruby on Rails, and still have a long way with CSS and HTML.
There are lots of books about CSS and HTML patterns, but I would like to know what is really applied to actual webpages.
For example, what's the best way of doing a simple webpage with a lateral menu, a logo on the top, and some text below?
Ok, it seems stupid, but there's lot of ways of doing that, or not ?
So, how can I learn this patterns and what are the real patterns ?
Would appreciate suggestions of books, articles, etc.
you can find some good css templates here:
http://www.csszengarden.com/
Actually in html and css there are not patterns in the oo sense.
I find this tutorial very useful:
Design and Code your first website
The nettuts website has a lot af very good free tutorials.
A very good book to begin is:
Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML
It varies from developer to developer. So I'll just tell you what I'm doing!
I'm actually following a very common pattern - separate ANY layout from the contents!
Into the HTML goes...
Text
<div/> containers with IDs to be layouted
And in the CSS goes...
Layout for the ID'd and class'ed <div/> layout containers
Colors, Background images
Fonts
It allows to rapidly change the whole page design without even touching the HTML! And it decreases both your server's traffic and the load time on the client pages, because the CSS file can be cached, since it does not change as much as the HTML does!
The CSS Zengarden nate posted is a very nice example of this pattern. The same unmodified HTML with dozens of CSS files with totally different looks!
This pattern also allows the same unmodified HTML to be displayed with automatically selected CSS files on huge displays, on small netbooks and on mobile devices. Can't be any better if you ask me!
You might want to check out some CSS libraries.
I don't personally like using them because I have ways that I like to do things and sometimes they aren't flexible enough for what I want to do. But since you're just starting out they might help you get something that looks good up really fast without having to worry about float drop bugs or margin collapsing or any other CSS quirks that are easy to hit but hard to recognize if you haven't seen them before.
An example would be the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Grids CSS that will help you set up many different kinds of grid layouts. To find more, I would search for "css framework" or "css library".
Another YUI resource I think would be really useful for you would be their design pattern library, which documents different ways to display common interface items and gives you resources to go implement them. This can help make your interface look familiar to users and can keep you from feeling like you have to redesign a drop-down box or something.
The rule of thumb should be to do all design in CSS and HTML is just HTML without calls to design. That way, like referenced above, you can change design rapidly.
A good reference for how this works is the Zengarden CSS site at: http://www.csszengarden.com/
This is a site I used often as I learned the ins and outs of CSS design.
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 about to begin working on a web page with a complex table-based layout (coded years ago).
One of the things I'd like to do is convert the layout to a proper CSS layout with divs and spans.
Can you suggest a good approach for tackling problems like this? Should I use a CSS framework like Blueprint? Just get in there and hack on it until it looks right? I already make heavy use of Firebug and the IE Developer Toolbar.
There generally isn't a silver bullet in converting between table and CSS. Every site is different and has different requirements. The only real answer is: simply start the markup from scratch.
The best advice is to write the markup entirely first. Make sure the markup is accurate, semantic, and represents your data entirely. Do not write the stylesheet... yet. After the markup is done, create the CSS. This way you have semantic markup and CSS is purely controlling the presentation.
CSS frameworks often don't advocate this approach to semantic markup because they force you to add additional tags to comply with their approach. Consequently, CSS frameworks are sometimes more trouble than its worth.
Do the markup, then the CSS.
Before you start, ensure you are using a CSS reset. Eric Meyer and Yahoo YUI are both excellent. This will help to make all your browsers look the same.
Also, install the HTML validator too. This will ensure your HTML is looking good and ready for adding the CSS.
Then grab a copy of Firebug and install it in firefox. This is excellent for seeing which CSS rules are doing what. You can disable individual rules by clicking s cross by each rule.
Now, visit some web pages which validate correctly and see what rules they have used in their style sheets.
Web sites to try are www.alistapart.com, CSS Zen Garden, SimpleBits etc.
The converting process will be a painful headache! I suggest you to start a whole redesign.
I don't know is this can be of any help, I build CSS Framework called Emastic (supports fluid and fixed columns) and you can simulate tables if you want here is the example Emastic Table
I second the commenters who say you should re-design the whole thing from scratch. Clean up the HTML and then make the CSS.
I'd like to add a reason to do so. Usually table-based designs are at least a few years old and therefore look quite passe. Take advantage of this opportunity to improve the design. Either a slight refresh or a complete overhaul depending on your taste and needs.
Iterative way works as well. Start with small blocks, converting them to CSS. This should simplify your table structure, hopefully leaving only the "basic grid" in tables and all the rest in CSS.
From there, pick an existing, tested solution if it's a simple layout (for 1 to 3 columns, there are tons of tested solutions out there). If it's more complex, go with Blueprint.
I wouldn't use a framework. Learning a new framework is only useful if you use it over & over again. Each framework has its own bugs and weaknesses. Use
display: table-cell;
to make a column. These will line up like float: left;. See http://quirksmode.org/css/css2/display.html
In some cases, using regular expressions could speed up your process.
For instance, something like this:
<table.*>\R*.*<tr>\R*.*<td[^>]*?>(.*)</td>
would match the start of a table and provide the contents of the first cell in $1 for a replace:
<div class="container">\n\t<div class="row">\n\t\t<div class="span6">$1</div>
Of course you'd need to customize to match your particular use case. If you have a number of similar pages, you might try hand coding one first and then using something like this to make converting the others simpler.
Another approach would be to use something like this jQuery plugin: https://github.com/ryandoom/jquery-plugin-table-to-div
It is intended to modify following rendering, but could be used during development to take a given table and provide a simple DIV based form of it.