Learning CSS – Part 4: Basic Styling continued
Election Night 1931 in Wellington, NZ (from The Commons)
Jumping back in where I left off in the last Learning CSS post, I still need to cover the basic styling options for links, lists and tables. At this point what I'm covering is still quite simple to learn and is partially review for me.
Links
The basic styling you can do for links using CSS is to change the link colour, visited colour, hover colour and active colour. Traditional website usability wisdom said that you should never change the colour of links because the majority of users relied on the colour as an indicator of what is clickable. To the delight of usability concious website designers everwhere, this is no longer the case. Today you can get away with using pretty much any colour for links, provided it stands out in contrast to the other colours used in your overall site design.
Learning CSS – Part 3: Basic Styling
Swedes in Hats (from The Commons)
My continued forays into the world of CSS had me learning an array of basic styling options. As mentioned in an earlier post, many of these style options were previously done with HTML. CSS took over these functions and provides a much wider array of options and removed the need to setup styles individually for every instance.
The W3 Schools tutorial covers 6 elements in the basic styling overview: Backgrounds, Text, Fonts, Links, Lists and Tables. Having had to deal with some aspects of site updates in previous years I ended up learning bits and pieces of the syntax for these, but never went over it in a methodical way. As would be expected, the basic styling is all pretty simple and doesn't take long to learn. With that in mind, I'm going to cover each aspect only briefly, with a little extra on a few interesting aspects added in.
HTML Review Time, Part Deux
Driving on the Moon (via The Commons)
Time for the second installment of interesting observations and ideas from my relearning of HTML! I nearly lost a chunk of this when I removed it from the first post and then cleared my clipboard accidentally. Luckily I still had it up in a preview of the post at the time.
First off let me just say, thank the flying spaghetti monster that frames are basically gone from the internet. Who ever liked frames? Horribly ugly, bad for SEO, bad for usability and did I mention ugly? At least iframes aren't so bad, but also frequently used in rather obnoxious ways. I will admit that there are have been a few times I've seen both frames and iframes used well, but they are few and far between.
Moving on, being able to use RGB colour values for elements was new to me. Maybe this was around 12 years ago, but from my memory you could only use a limited set of named colours or HEX codes. So instead of "red" or "#FF0000" you can use "rgb(255,0,0)". I think I might like the HEX code option bettter, but it's nice to have options.
HTML Review Time! Learning what I mostly already know.
Some girls in gas masks (from The Commons)
I did most of my HTML review a few weeks ago when I was first starting out this project, with the intention of posting about it rather sooner. It didn't take that long to go through the W3 Schools HTML Tutorial since I really hadn't forgotten or missed too much, having needed to use HTML at least occasionally over the years.
I'm not going to spend a ton of time going over the whole thing. Instead, I'm going to quickly cover some of the things I learned or otherwise thought interesting.
I learned quite awhile back that paragraph tags (<p>) need to be closed now. For anyone out there whose fairly new to HTML, this was no always the case. Along with this, "empty" elements (tags which don't have any closing tag, like the break or image tags) have to have a closing slash following a space at the end of the tag before the >. This is because of the introduction of XHTML, which requires all tags to be closed. Along with the closing all tags requirement, you now have to use lower case for all tags. For some reason when I did HTML in highschool I used all uppercase. Why did I do this? No idea, but it didn't matter, so I did. I have some vague recollection of other people doing it too fairly often.
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