Cascading Style Sheets

Smashing Magazine published an excellent primer for CSS3 properties by Inayaili de Leon today which referenced a little of my work. I was pleased, but as today as gone on and I’ve watched the comments roll, my heart started to sink.

Could this be the day that I eat my words about CSS frameworks? I’ve been mean to them in the past, written harsh things. I once likened them to instant cake mixes in response to Jeff Croft’s What’s not to love about CSS frameworks?.

I wanted to learn more about CSS attribute selectors. — This article was originally published on And All That Malarkey on February 20th, 2005.

How do you answer the Internet Explorer 6 question?

I've got a Honda CRV. It's eleven years old. It's rusty around the bonnet, the electric windows are sticky and the exhaust is noisy. That's OK. It's been reliable, hardly serviced and as I only drive it a few miles about twice a week, it does everything that I need it to do. I'll probably drive it until I can't drive it anymore.

The Internet Explorer team today posted details that IE8’s Compatibility Mode (replicating IE7) will not render sites exactly as IE7 does.

A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Taylor interviewed me for the Boag World bodcast on the subject of Internet Explorer 8 and the state of CSS in browsers generally.

No, they don’t. As Jeremy Keith so kindly pointed out, it’s a subject that I have been banging on about for quite a while now.

It seems like a lifetime ago that I first sat down with a cup of tea and a bourbon biscuit and thought about the conventions that we use for naming HTML/XHTML id and class attribute values.

Who said that you can’t teach an old rocker new tricks? At An Event Apart Chicago, it was Dan Cederholm‘s latest talk example, Color Transparency With RGBa that made me sit up and take notes.

I was lucky to be sent a preview copy of Rachel Andrew‘s soon-to-be-published book Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong!, published by those nice chaps at SitePoint. I’ll be writing a full review later this week, but as the book is largely (almost exclusively) devoted to CSS display : table; properties, I couldn’t wait to try out some of the techniques she advocates.

Want an easier way to re-style and optimize your pages to work better in Safari Touch (or Mobile Safari if you prefer) on the iPhone or iPod Touch? I did and now with a custom version of Allan Jardine‘s Conditional-CSS I have it. And you do too.

Back in April, I was booked by Carsonified to present a half-day workshop on Microformats as part of their Future Of Web Design London spectacular. So what have Microformats got to do with death rays?

Having been booked by Carsonified to host a full-day workshop on advanced CSS back in May, in the weeks leading up to the show I had a flash of inspiration. Why not combine one of my favourite topics with one of my favourite musicians?

My entry of last week, where I called for the current W3C CSS Working Group to be immediately disbanded, has generated some serious debate, and a few raised voices. I’m glad that is happening. Now, after a little more consideration, I thought I would outline some concrete proposals for how the CSS Working Group could change for the better.

Following Opera’s action, today I am calling on Bert Bos, chairman of the CSS Working Group, and those higher up within the W3C including Sir Tim Berners Lee, to immediately disband the CSS Working Group in its current form. I am asking for immediate action to be taken on the formulation of a replacement CSS Working Group that will include new members who are not the representatives of browser vendors.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been bombarded (in e-mail, in person, and over IM) with questions about instant cake mixes. It’s completely understandable people would come to me with these questions.

If your Internet connection happens to lose a bit of CSS data, you get a mess on your screen.

I would prefer that clients save money for more valuable things than achieving pixel perfection.

How can the CSS Working Group give web designers, developers and visitors want they need?

To Chris Wilson and the IE7 team, I acknowlege the work that you have done thus far and I’m confident that IE7 will be everything that I expect it to be. Please don’t let me down.

The one where Malarkey takes his clothes off.

The one where Malarkey sits with the Internet Explorer team at MIX06 to ask for a recommended answer to a common question.

If you can help out by checking across a range of pages and posting links to screenshots, I’ll be unconditionally in your debt.

As with all good thrillers, I want to find out what will happen at the end.

Covering <body> attributes, attribute selectors and pseudo-elements. Scattered thoughts written during the 2005 Stuff and Nonsense design.

I’ve been trying to better optimise my CSS recently, and this has lead me to wonder where certain rules are best arranged.

I’ve been thinking about making a CSS Zen Garden entry for a little while now, so I started by making a graphic to illustrate the Garden XHTML structure.

A recent dig into Mozilla’s style-sheets and coding guidelines got me thinking more about the conventions that I use inside my CSS files, to make them more logical and easier to update.

While Internet Explorer’s patchy support for W3C CSS can lead to hair-pulling frustrations, its CSS extensions offer designers and developers an extra set of tools which, it might be argued, have their rightful place.