CSS Mastery: Page Layout
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One of the major benefits of CSS is the ability to control page layout without needing to use presentational markup. This week you'll learn how to horizontally center a design on a page, create two and three column float based layouts and more. By Andy Budd, Cameron Moll and Simon Collison. 0828
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CSS can be difficult to master as there are many aspects to learn. So what do you do? First of all, don't give up. Secondly, check out this volume, which uses a new approach, enabling the reader to quickly learn the technical aspects of CSS. By David Sawyer McFarland. 1023
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CSS rules are always interpreted by Web browsers. These standards give specifics on how browsers should display those rules - but they're not always followed. To design pages with CSS, you need to know the standards, and to understand how browsers' quirks and flaws will affect your Web design results. By Kynn Bartlett. 0912
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This week you'll learn about AP (or Absolutely Positioned) Elements. These are  CSS-driven "content blocks" in Dreamweaver that can contain text, images, media elements and more. Additionally, you can freely position the AP Element anywhere you want on a page. By Zak Ruvalcaba. 0128
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ProDevTips.com has posted part nine of their long-running series about using the Zend Framework (and Smarty) to create a CMS/Community website.   This piece covers creating a proper folder structure so that we can have a skin system. I've also created a folder for the admin section which is fully contained with it's own controllers folder and so on. Another unrelated change that has happened since the last part is sub menu logic which we will also take a look at.   They make updates to the bootstrap file to introduce another controller directory and, inside of that, create the Administrator controller and integrate it with a Smarty template to show different menu items if an admin user is logged in.
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Using a sample design, a Web page is transformed from a browser-friendly page to a browser and a printer-friendly page through CSS coding.
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WebReference.com has a simple new tutorial today showing how to create alternating table rows in the output for your application.   Almost every database driven Web site uses alternating row colors when displaying a list of records, a concept used all over the Internet.  You've seen it used, you like it, and now you want to do it yourself.  But you're not sure how to accomplish it.  Well you've come to the right place.  I'm going to discuss the basic idea behind achieving this and give some concrete examples demonstrating different ways to implement it.   Their script loops through the information (numbers in their case) and checks, using the modulus operator to check and see which of the CSS styles it should apply to the div. To give a range of possibility, they also show how to do it with a while loop instead of a for to do a little benchmarking of the methods.
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Paul Jones talks about an aspect of the Solar framework (Solar_App_Bookmarks) and its inclusion in the Stenhouse CSS Framework:   Solar comes with a reference application, Solar_App_Bookmarks. As I outlined in an earlier post about views and layouts in Solar, the bookmarks application is extended from Solar_App_Base. The Base package holds all the layouts, and those layouts are what I want to talk about in this entry. Solar_App_Base comes packaged with the Stenhouse CSS Framework.   Paul briefly introduces the framework and includes example code - an XHTML scaffold, main layout files and some layout partials to show the framework in use.
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From the PHP-Coding-Practices.com website today, there's a new post that, using a tip from this article on BarelyFitz, shows how to control CSS information with PHP.   Today I stumbled upon a cool article that explains how one can control one's CSS colors via PHP to former relative shades. How is this done I hear you asking? Just look at the following code.   His example uses the tutorial's csscolor class and shows how to implement it with a base color and a highlight color and use it to generate variations of the same shades.
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(InfoWorld) - Honing in on browser incompatibility issues in Web development, Adobe Systems on Thursday is launching CSS Advisor, a Web site that documents these problems and offers solutions. The site is geared to users of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and features best practices for Web page development. "With CSS Advisor, the problem that we set out to solve is that people are wasting a huge amount of time trying to make their pages look the same across different browsers," said Kenneth Berger, Adobe product manager for the company's Dreamweaver technology. CSS Advisor provides a central resource to show developers what they might run into, such as dealing with content overflow on an Internet Explorer page that was not a problem with Firefox, Berger said. Developers can access lists of issues focusing on margins, he said. About 30 browser issues are featured now. CSS itself has introduced a lot of compatibility issues, Berger said. "There's a major change in Web design, with people changing from table-based layout to CSS layout," said Berger. But CSS offers advantages such as making pages more lightweight so they download faster. CSS pages also are more searchable and more easily accessible by disabled persons. Adobe has seeded CSS Advisor with a lot of information but the community-driven site allows for user input as well by anyone with an Adobe account. Adobe is administering the site to prevent inaccurate information from being posted. Adobe plans to integrate its Dreamweaver technology with CSS Advisors next spring. "What you'll be able to do is automatically detect top issues within Dreamweaver proactively," Berger said. Dreamweaver is Adobe's HTML-based tool for building rich Internet applications that do not use the company's Flash technology. CSS Advisor is a "great idea," said Dreamweaver user Jason Brightman, Web director at Harris Publications. Serving as central repository, CSS Advisor gathers together information now scattered over hundreds of sites, Brightman said. Developers are running into all sorts of cross-browser compatibility issues these days, Brightman said. "A lot of them have to do with IE 6, which is not a very CSS-compliant browser," he said. CSS itself allows for faster development of Web sites and it separates design and content layers to make it easier to redesign or update, he added. Also on Friday, Adobe is announcing version 1.4 of its Spry Framework, which features a JavaScript library to help developers get started using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). "Essentially, the problem with AJAX is that it's really not as easy as folks would like, to get started with," Berger said. Version 1.4 is a preview release that features a higher level of maturity than the initial 1.0 release offered in April. Developers can use version 1.4 in production systems. Featured in version 1.4 are form validation widgets, enabling pages to feature forms that can be validated by users on an e-commerce site. Data such as credit card information can be validated. A general release of Spry is expected with the 2007 availability of Dreamweaver.
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In his continuing effort to redesign his blog, Shiflett.org, he's been working on one of the things that really makes a blog useful - the commenting system. Specifically, he wants site visitors to be able to add their own code listings to the comments they post. He gives more detail in this new post.   I've been playing with this tonight. Feel free to follow along as I go. The first thing you want to do is create an ordered list from the code you want to format ($code in these examples).   He gives an example of a listing using his system and explains how it all works. It's a mixture of:  PHP for parsing the data inside the 'code' tags CSS to correctly style the information, whitespace and all Some ini settings to set parameters for... ...the use of highlight string on the PHP code contents  A little str_replace magic later and you have list items styled as code blocks on your page. Check out his demo for an example.
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A discussion of how to use frame styles in OOo Writer.
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The O'Reilly Network has a new article this morning targeted towards those out there wondering what page controllers are and what is so life-changing about using them in your code.
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When hard a work coding, browser windows with manual entries have a nasty habit of multiplying (at least when I work). So, neededless to say, I was happy to find GotAPI.com, a site that compiles the reference materials for several different web development languages into one handy browser window.  The page, by default, searches HTML resources, including the W3C specs and Microsoft's MSDN materials. Those and the w3schools website show up often in the other languages available - CSS, XSL, XML, and XPath. The PHP manual that's referenced is just pulled from the PHP.net site, but it's still nice to have it all right there.  When searching, a "suggeted terms" box pops up to help you narrow down the search faster. It searches not only the beginnings of the words for your term, but it looks inside them as well, matching anywhere.   It would be nice if the site had some kind of bookmarking system built into it - then you could keep a reference and just flip back and forth between the pages with a single click of the mouse.
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This is an updated and revised annotation to the HTML 4.01 Specification published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), detailing the differences between the specification and its implementation in Netscape Navigator 7.2 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0. By Lee Underwood. 1116
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Stefan Mischook has release three new parts of his "Building Objects in PHP" video series:   Part 1 - This is a hands-on video where I hope the viewer will actually write code along with me. I want to stress that this video (like everything else on this site,) targets beginners .. not old PHP hacks. Part 2 - In this video, we actually use the object we created in Part 1, in our PHP page. Part 3 - In this video, I clarify a point I was trying to make in part 2. In a nutshell, I talk about why it makes sense to keep any page rendering code (HTML and CSS) out of your business logic classes.   Lots of other videos (on different topics too) are also posted on Stefan's website.
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This week you're going to learn how to create a Color Picker similar to the one used in Photoshop, but entirely in JavaScript! By Mark Kahn. 0901