Elliot Swan

If you’ve looked at any of the stuff to be included in CSS3, you were no doubt bouncing off the walls in excitement until you remembered how long it tends to take some browsers to support that kind of stuff.

But some good news: Quite a bit of this CSS3 awesomeness can be used right now to spice up your designs. Some (most) of it will not render in all browsers equally (generally those of the IE variety), but websites don’t need to look the same in every browser–nor should they. Just because IE6 users can’t see some fancy effect doesn’t mean everybody shouldn’t. Similar to how those watching TV on a standard television will not be able to see HD, users on older browsers need not get the same experience as those on newer browsers as long as they see nothing wrong with the site.

But enough ranting and onto the good part. CSS3 properties you can use now and how to use them:

Read more…

The CSS text-shadow property is now supported by Safari 3+, Opera 9.5+, and FireFox 3.1 (currently in beta). So when is the time to start using it?

Now.

Certainly not everybody will see it, but better to have some people experience it than nobody at all. That is, if you think before you type and don’t abuse it. When used correctly, text-shadows can be a great addition to a design. If you aren’t careful, though, it’s quite possible for them to end up as bad as the next blink tag.

Read more…

If you’re viewing this via your favorite web browser, you’ve probably noticed that things look very different than last time. If you’re reading this from your favorite RSS reader, come on over and check things out.

I’ll be providing many more posts in the near future with all sorts of things learned from this redesign (subscribe to the feed if you haven’t already to keep up with those), but I just wanted to do a quick overview post to quickly point out a few things.

Read more…

With the redesign on its way and actually in the browser testing stage now, I’ve had the fortune to spend a few quality hours debugging IE as of late. Generally I don’t have too many un-fixable issues with the browser and any PNG issues can be easily solved with a filter or some JavaScript, but today’s pushed me over the edge.

Why it’s usually no biggie.

As I’m sure you are aware, IE 6 doesn’t fully support transparent PNGs and generally display them with ugly gray backgrounds. Generally this can be solved by using a filter that IE does support as follows:

filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src="theimage.png", sizingMethod="crop");

There’s also a brilliant solution that avoids the filter and can be used through the DD_belatedPNG script.

Read more…

Now, I’m somewhat known for speaking out against CSS frameworks. However, I have to come clean: I’ve become quite a fan of BluePrint CSS.

Read more…

When developing large sites, stylesheets can get fairly messy and hard to keep track of. If you don’t stay organized, you can end up making them larger than they really need to be and doing more work than you should have to. Here’s just a few ways to can help avoid that.

Read more…

While it’s been almost two months since I’ve written a solid full-length post here, I’m not dead, and I haven’t been completely idle on the web, either. As my old portfolio has been extremely outdated for far too long now, I am finally launching my new portfolio. Check it out, tell me what you think, hire me, send me hate mail…whatever you guys like to do.

Read more…

Code is Poetry. It’s a phrase found in WordPress’s footer that should be true but often isn’t. At 9rules somebody asked if code really is poetry–I say that not all code is poetry, but all code should (and can) be poetry.

Read more…

While Flickr has a nice little tool for making Flickr badges, sometimes you just need more flexibility. Here I’ve documented the Flickr badge API and what HTML is being outputted so that you can seriously customize the way your photos are being displayed.

Read more…

Remeber those old-school “choose your own adventure” books? You know, you read a few pages, made a choice, then saved your place in case you died from it? (Oh, the days before auto checkpoints). Well I’ve got a similar thing for you.

Read more…