Or, Whatever became of the CSS Tutorial?
I believe it is an appropriate time for a CSS viral marketing campaign by the Web Standards community.
The novelty and excitement of CSS passed last year. Everyone’s waiting for CSS3 modules. Google any CSS [keyword] and most of the names I read several years ago are gone from the first ten pages for tutorials or explanations or examples of best practices, Web Standards CSS coding. And, those that remain are decent but not ones I would suggest to CSS beginners nor intermediate designers.
What about continuing fundamental Education?
Did you ever meet someone who knew some CSS and decided that absolute positioning was the ideal method for constructing a three column layout? Though their CSS and HyperText Markup Language construction may be odd.
Whilst in Austin, several programmers cited several sources that made me cringe. Even though everyone with which you discuss CSS may know about CSS, not everyone knows how to use it. The programmers answer for CSS was something like,
<div>
<table>
<tr>
<td><div></div></td><td><div></div></td><td><div></div></td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
It’s a simple three column layout, isn’t it.
Basic, fundament CSS tutorials are usually missing from search results. I searched Google for representative sites but I couldn’t find—in those particular phrases—the Little Boxes tutorials: so I did Little Boxes and found it. However, how many developers (and, programmers) do not know of The Noodle Incident.
Ingo Chao’s Authoritative “On having layout — the concept of hasLayout in IE/Win”
See below and see if you would recommend any of the pages returned in search results:
http://www.google.com/search?q=css+haslayout= css hasLayouthttp://www.google.com/search?q=css+has+layout= css has layouthttp://www.google.com/search?q=css+layout= css layouthttp://www.google.com/search?q=css+tutorial
EchoEcho CSS Tutorial
CSS allows you to customize the lists that can be made with HTML.
The good news is that there are many powerful properties for doing so.
The bad news is that Netscape and Internet Explorer often support these properties in different ways. Both browsers have limitations in their support of list styles.
Netscape browsers only let you add the list CSS to
<LI>tags - not just any tag.Internet Explorer’s support of CSS with relation to lists is only fully supported for browsers on the Windows platform.[Elementary emphasis.]
Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Tutorial
How to Manipulate Text Effects in Response to Mouse Events
<STYLE>
BODY { background-color: black;color: gold;font: 24pt sans-serif; }
UL.ActivateTextEffect { color: orange;letter-spacing: 2; }
</STYLE>
How to Fly Text in DHTML
This article demonstrates both ways to implement flying text through the marquee element and through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) positioning. To better understand positioning in Dynamic HTML (DHTML), as well as the CSS object model in Internet Explorer 4.0
<MARQUEE WIDTH="700" STYLE="position:absolute; top: 180"
... DIRECTION="left">
<UL>
<LI class=yellow>Use the Document Object Model (DOM)<br>
to create interactive documents.
</UL>
</MARQUEE>
http://www.google.com/search?q=css+layout+tutorial
Little Boxes and CSS Layout Techniques: for Fun and Profit
There appears to be a disconnect between blogs and static sites. I have not found why but it’s there nonetheless. Static sites have pages in the search results; blogs very seldom. And, please note that just because a blog page has significant Page Rank, it may very well fall because visitor traffic will fall. Page Rank is good for short term effects, e.g., top ranking in Google for a brief time period when an article may displace an historical, authoritative page; links are best for the historical, authoritative effect, i.e., that authoritative page will shift in the search rankings due to Page Rank machinations but it will remain after that upstart albeit very popular article falls.
I’ve got this suggestion. All of the well-known and often read authors repost their original articles. Or, at least revisit an original article and link internal to that article. [Note: Suggested reading does not seem to work in Google.] Or, write an original review of an old tutorial by a different author.
Perhaps, if A List Apart were to issue a retrospective of the most influential CSS articles. Or, W3C Schools were to rewrite their tutorials.
Google any phrase that you like. If you believe that the first ten (10) results represent acceptable representation of Web Standards authority sites, try a different phrase.
Or, link to an article that you like when writing your own article.
Curious thing, really.
Most developers and programmers don’t know proper CSS practices. Though, most heard about Web Standards. How do we continue to advance Web Standards if new users cannot find those CSS tutorials.
