If every person on our blue Earth watched this video, the world would be a much better place. At least for a few minutes. Listen closely to Carl Sagan’s words till the end. It won’t fail to get you teary.-JD More »

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CSS’ barrier to entry is extremely low, mainly due to the nature of its syntax. Being clear and easy to understand, the syntax makes sense even to the inexperienced Web designer. It’s so simple, in fact, that you could style a simple CSS-based website within a few hours of learning it.

But this apparent simplicity is deceitful. If after a few hours of work, your perfectly crafted website looks great in Safari, all hell might break loose if you haven’t taken the necessary measures to make it work in Internet Explorer. In a panic, you add hacks and filters where only a few tweaks or a different approach might do. Knowing how to deal with these issues comes with experience, with trial and error and with failing massively and then learning the correct way.

Understanding a few often overlooked concepts is also important. The concepts may be hard to grasp and look boring at first, but understanding them and knowing how to take advantage of them is important.

Two of these concepts are specificity and inheritance. Not very common words among Web designers, are they? Talking about border-radius and text-shadow is a lot more fun; but specificity and inheritance are fundamental concepts that any person who wants to be good at CSS should understand. They will help you create clean, maintainable and flexible style sheets. Let’s look at what they mean and how they work.

The notion of a “cascade” is at the heart of CSS (just look at its name). It ultimately determines which properties will modify a given element. The cascade is tied to three main concepts: importance, specificity and source order. The cascade follows these three steps to determine which properties to assign to an element. By the end of this process, the cascade has assigned a weight to each rule, and this weight determines which rule takes precedence, when more than one applies.

Please consider reading our previous related article:

• CSS Specificity: Things You Should Know

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that there is a Smashing eBook Series? Book #1 is Professional Web Design, 242 pages for just $9,90.]

1. Importance

Style sheets can have a few different sources:

1. User agent
   For example, the browser’s default style sheet.
2. User
   Such as the user’s browser options.
3. Author
   This is the CSS provided by the page (whether inline, embedded or external)

By default, this is the order in which the different sources are processed, so the author’s rules will override those of the user and user agent, and so on.

There is also the !important declaration to consider in the cascade. This declaration is used to balance the relative priority of user and author style sheets. While author style sheets take precedence over user ones, if a user rule has !important applied to it, it will override even an author rule that also has !important applied to it.

Knowing this, let’s look at the final order, in ascending order of importance:

1. User agent declarations,
2. User declarations,
3. Author declarations,
4. Author !important declarations,
5. User !important declarations.

This flexibility in priority is key because it allows users to override styles that could hamper the accessibility of a website. (A user might want a larger font or a different color, for example.)

2. Specificity

Every CSS rule has a particular weight (as mentioned in the introduction), meaning it could be more or less important than the others or equally important. This weight defines which properties will be applied to an element when there are conflicting rules.

Upon assessing a rule’s importance, the cascade attributes a specificity to it; if one rule is more specific than another, it overrides it.

If two rules share the same weight, source and specificity, the later one is applied.

2.1 How to Calculate Specificity?

There are several ways to calculate a selector’s specificity.

The quickest way is to do the following. Add 1 for each element and pseudo-element (for example, :before and :after); add 10 for each attribute (for example, [type=”text”]), class and pseudo-class (for example, :link or :hover); add 100 for each ID; and add 1000 for an inline style.

Let’s calculate the specificity of the following selectors using this method:

• p.note
  1 class + 1 element = 11
• #sidebar p[lang="en"]
  1 ID + 1 attribute + 1 element = 111
• body #main .post ul li:last-child
  1 ID + 1 class + 1 pseudo-class + 3 elements = 123

A similar method, described in the W3C’s specifications, is to start with a=0, b=0, c=0 and d=0 and replace the numbers accordingly:

• a = 1 if the style is inline,
• b = the number of IDs,
• c = the number of attribute selectors, classes and pseudo-classes,
• d = the number of element names and pseudo-elements.

Let’s calculate the specificity of another set of selectors:

• <p style="color:#000000;">
  a=1, b=0, c=0, d=0 → 1000
• footer nav li:last-child
  a=0, b=0, c=1, d=3 → 0013
• #sidebar input:not([type="submit"])
  a=0, b=1, c=1, d=1 → 0111
  (Note that the negation pseudo-class doesn’t count, but the selector inside it does.)

If you’d rather learn this in a more fun way, Andy Clarke drew a clever analogy between specificity and Star Wars back in 2005, which certainly made it easier for Star Wars fans to understand specificity. Another good explanation is “CSS Specificity for Poker Players,” though slightly more complicated.

Andy Clarke’s CSS Specificity Wars chart.

Remember that non-CSS presentational markup is attributed with a specificity of 0, which would apply, for example, to the font tag.

Getting back to the !important declaration, keep in mind that using it on a shorthand property is the same as declaring all of its sub-properties as !important (even if that would revert them to the default values).

If you are using imported style sheets (@import) in your CSS, you have to declare them before all other rules. Thus, they would be considered as coming before all the other rules in the CSS file.

Finally, if two selectors turn out to have the same specificity, the last one will override the previous one(s).

2.2 Making Specificity Work For You

If not carefully considered, specificity can come back to haunt you and lead you to unwittingly transform your style sheets into a complex hierarchy of unnecessarily complicated rules.

You can follow a few guidelines to avoid major issues:

• When starting work on the CSS, use generic selectors, and add specificity as you go along;
• Using advanced selectors doesn’t mean using unnecessarily complicated ones;
• Rely more on specificity than on the order of selectors, so that your style sheets are easier to edit and maintain (especially by others).

A good rule of thumb can be found in Jim Jeffers’ article, “The Art and Zen of Writing CSS”:

Refactoring CSS selectors to be less specific is exponentially more difficult than simply adding specific rules as situations arise.

3. Inheritance

A succinct and clear explanation of inheritance is in the CSS3 Cascading and Inheritance module specifications (still in “Working draft” mode):

Inheritance is a way of propagating property values from parent elements to their children.

Some CSS properties are inherited by the children of elements by default. For example, if you set the body tag of a page to a specific font, that font will be inherited by other elements, such as headings and paragraphs, without you having to specifically write as much. This is the magic of inheritance at work.

The CSS specification determines whether each property is inherited by default or not. Not all properties are inherited, but you can force ones to be by using the inherit value.

3.1 Object-Oriented Programming Inheritance

Though beyond the scope of this article, CSS inheritance shouldn’t be confused with object-oriented programming (OOP) inheritance. Here is the definition of OOP inheritance from Wikipedia, and it makes clear that we are not talking about the same thing:

In object-oriented programming (OOP), inheritance is a way to form new classes […] using classes that have already been defined. Inheritance is employed to help reuse existing code with little or no modification. The new classes […] inherit attributes and behavior of the pre-existing classes. …

3.2 How Inheritance Works

When an element inherits a value from its parent, it is inheriting its computed value. What does this mean? Every CSS property goes through a four-step process when its value is being determined. Here’s an excerpt from the W3C specification:

The final value of a property is the result of a four-step calculation: the value is determined through specification (the “specified value”), then resolved into a value that is used for inheritance (the “computed value”), then converted into an absolute value if necessary (the “used value”), and finally transformed according to the limitations of the local environment (the “actual value”).

In other words:

1. Specified value
   The user agent determines whether the value of the property comes from a style sheet, is inherited or should take its initial value.
2. Computed value
   The specified value is resolved to a computed value and exists even when a property doesn’t apply. The document doesn’t have to be laid out for the computed value to be determined.
3. Used value
   The used value takes the computed value and resolves any dependencies that can only be calculated after the document has been laid out (like percentages).
4. Actual value
   This is the value used for the final rendering, after any approximations have been applied (for example, converting a decimal to an integer).

If you look at any CSS property’s specification, you will see that it defines its initial (or default) value, the elements it applies to, its inheritance status and its computed value (among others). For example, the background-color specification states the following:

Name: background-color
Value: <color>
Initial: transparent
Applies to: all elements
Inherited: no
Percentages: N/A
Media: visual
Computed value: the computed color(s)

Confusing? It can be. So, what do we need to understand from all this? And why is it relevant to inheritance?

Let’s go back to the first sentence of this section, which should make more sense now. When an element inherits a value from its parent, it inherits its computed value. Because the computed value exists even if it isn’t specified in the style sheet, a property can be inherited even then: the initial value will be used. So, you can make use of inheritance even if the parent doesn’t have a specified property.

3.3 Using Inheritance

The most important thing to know about inheritance is that it’s there and how it works. If you ignore the jargon, inheritance is actually very straightforward.

Imagine you had to specify the font-size or font-family of every element, instead of simply adding it to the body element? That would cumbersome, which is why inheritance is so helpful.

Don’t break it by using the universal selector (*) with properties that inherit by default. Bobby Jack wrote an interesting post about this on his Five-Minute Argument blog. You don’t have to remember all of the properties that inherit, but you will in time.

Rarely does a CSS-related article not bring some kind of bad news about Internet Explorer. This article is no exception. IE supports the inherit value only from version 8, except for the direction and visibility properties. Great.

4. Using Your Tools

If you use tools like Firebug or Safari’s Web Inspector, you can see how a given cascade works, which selectors have higher specificity and how inheritance is working on a particular element.

For example, here below is Firebug in action, inspecting an element on the page. You can see that some properties are overridden (i.e. crossed out) by other more specific rules:

Firebug in action, informing you how specificity is working.

In the next shot, Safari’s Web Inspector shows the computed values of an element. This way, you can see the values even though they haven’t been explicitly added to the style sheet:

With Safari’s Web Inspector (and Firebug), you can view the computed values of a particular element.

5. Conclusion

Hopefully this article has opened your eyes to (or has refreshed your knowledge of) CSS inheritance and specificity. We encourage you to read the articles cited below, as well as Smashing Magazine’s previous article on the topic.

Even if you don’t think about them, these issues are present in your daily work as a CSS author. Especially in the case of specificity, it’s important to know how they affect your style sheets and how to plan for them so that they cause only minimal (or no) problems.

Resources And Further Reading

• Assigning Property Values, Cascading, and Inheritance, W3C
• CSS3: Cascading and Inheritance, W3C
• Selectors Level 3: Calculating a Selector’s Specificity, W3C
• The Cascade, SitePoint
• Inheritance and Cascade, Dev.Opera
• CSS Inheritance, Dorward Online
• Cascading Order and Inheritance in CSS, David’s Kitchen
• Understanding Style Precedence in CSS: Specificity, Inheritance, and the Cascade, Van SEO Design
• Specifics on CSS Specificity, CSS-Tricks
• Link Specificity, meyerweb.com
• Redundancy vs. Dependency, mezzoblue

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© Inayaili de Leon for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | 40 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: CSS

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Yes, this is another round-up of fresh and useful Javascript techniques, tools and resources. But don’t close the tab yet, as you might find this one very useful. In this selection we present calendars, forms, buttons, navigation, debugging, optimization and compatibility tables as well as handy resources and tools. We also cover various jQuery-plugins that will help you extend the functionality of your website and improve user experience with ready components or coding solutions.

The last section also covers a number of useful educational resources such as a compilation of useful JavaScript coding practices, a detailed comparison of JavaScript frameworks and general JavaScript programming conventions. We are looking forward to your feedback.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Fresh JavaScript Tools That Will Improve Your Workflow
• 45 Powerful CSS/JavaScript-Techniques
• 70 Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

[By the way: The network tab (on the top of the page) is updated several times a day. It features manually selected articles from the best web design blogs!]

Calendars and Timelines

jDigiClock – Digital Clock (HTC Hero inspired)
jDigiClock is a jQuery plugin inspired from HTC Hero Clock Widget.

jQuery Sliding Clock v1.1
jQuery transpearant Slider clock with CSS sprites.

Date / Time Picker
Note that this control is not designed to work in IE6; although it will function correctly in most cases, the positioning of the calendar may be way off depending on how your page is styled.

JavaScript Debugging and Validation Tools

Venkman JavaScript Debugger project page
Venkman is the code name for Mozilla’s JavaScript Debugger. Venkman aims to provide a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Gecko-based browsers namely Firefox 3.x, the Netscape 7.x series of browsers, Netscape 9.x series, Mozilla Seamonkey 1.x and Mozilla Seamonkey 2.x. It does not include Gecko-based browsers such as K-Meleon 1.x, Galeon 2.x and Netscape 8.x. The debugger is available as an add-on package in XPI format. Venkman JavaScript Debugger has been provided as part of the Mozilla install distribution since October 3rd 2001.

CompanionJS
Companion.JS (pronounced Companion dot JS or CJS) is a Javascript debugger for IE.

How to Test your JavaScript Code with QUnit
QUnit is a powerful JavaScript unit testing framework that helps you to debug code. It’s written by members of the jQuery team, and is the official test suite for jQuery. But QUnit is general enough to test any regular JavaScript code, and it’s even able to test server-side JavaScript via some JavaScript engine like Rhino or V8.

JS Bin – Collaborative JavaScript Debugging
JS Bin is an open source collaborative JavaScript debugging tool.

Forms, Buttons & Navigation

Making a Google Wave History Slider
Here is shown how to create a Google Wave-like history slider. Using it will enable visitors to go back and forth in time to view the changes that take place on a comment thread.

Fancy Radio Buttons With jQuery
Creation of 2 mandatory option sets that a user could choose, while hiding off the radio button inputs and using an anchor links to make it a bit more usable.

Creative Button Animations with Sprites and JQuery
Fading hover effect for which the transition is smoothed with JavaScript, using jQuery library.

Password (un)Masking
JavaScript jQuery that toggles the masking and unmasking of the password field.

jQuery MagicLine Navigation
These “sliding” style navigation bars have been around a while, and turns out it’s really pretty darn easy. Here are put two examples together.

Fixed Fade Out Menu: A CSS and jQuery Tutorial
The aim is to have a fixed navigation that follows the user when he scrolls, and only subtly showing itself by fading out and becoming almost transparent. When the user hovers over it, the menu then becomes opaque again. Inside of the navigation we will have some links, a search input and a top and bottom button that let the user navigate to the top or the bottom of the page.

jQuery plugin: Simplest Twitter-like dynamic character count for textareas and input fields
The best way to explain what this plugin does is to mention Twitter. Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters. While typing the Twitter post there is this always present information about how many characters the users have before reaching the limit. The information is not only provided merely by displaying a number, there are different colors applied to certain stages to notify the user about the status.

Sliding Labels v2
Form label keeping the label inline, but sliding it off to the left rather than going away on click.

Ketchup Plugin
Ketchup is a slim jQuery Plugin that validates your forms. It aims to be very flexible and extendable for its appearance and functionality.

Layout tools

jQuery {css}designerGrid Plugin
{css} designerGrid is A jQuery Plugin developed for website interface developers who use the grid system of layout. {css} designerGrid is intended to assist these developers with CSS prototyping.

css-template-layout
JavaScript (jQuery) implementation of the CSS Template Layout Module

How to create a fluid grid with jQuery
Grid-based layout is probably the more preferred way to style up a webpage to give it more magazine-like look and feel. This tutorial is about how to use CSS and Javascript to create a fluid grid-based layout (See demo here). The algorithm/procedure used in this tutorial is very simple and straightforward. There are more advanced algorithms out there which can handle multiple scenarios. But the purpose is to understand the basic logic on how to create such layout. So here it goes…

closure-templates
Closure Templates are a client- and server-side templating system that helps you dynamically build reusable HTML and UI elements. They are easy to learn and customizable to fit your application’s needs. Closure Templates support JavaScript and Java and use a data model and expression syntax that works for either language. You can also use the built-in message support to easily localize your applications.

Useful jQuery Plugins

TipTip jQuery Plugin
TipTip detects the edges of the browser window and will make sure the tooltip stays within the current window size. As a result the tooltip will adjust itself to be displayed above, below, to the left or to the right of the element with TipTip applied to it, depending on what is necessary to stay within the browser window. TipTip is a very lightweight and intelligent custom tooltip jQuery plugin. It uses ZERO images and is completely customizable via CSS. It’s also only 3.5kb minified!

jQuery Roundabout
Roundabout is a jQuery plugin that converts a structure of static HTML elements into a highly customizable turntable-like interactive area. (And now, not just turntables, but many shapes!)

jParse – jQuery XML Parse Plugin
jParse is a jQuery plugin that allows you to parse XML that was fetched with the jQuery .ajax method (making it fully customizable).

jQuery Quicksand plugin
Reorder and filter items with a nice shuffling animation.

typeQuery, change website typography with jquery
typeQuery gives the flexibility to change the font-family for everything you define with class, id, or tag, this example is referring to the selected item on a select object with id=”tag” and the font-family value at select object with id=”family”: $($("#tag").val()).css("font-family", $("#family").val());

Flip! A jQuery plugin v0.9.9
Flip is a jQuery plugin that will flip easily your elements in four directions.

Data Encryption With JavaScript: jCryption
jCryption is a jQuery plugin for encrypting POST/GET data submitted by forms. It uses public-key algorithm of RSA for the encryption & has a PHP file for handling the decryption of data.

Minimalist jQuery: 11 useful plugins under 4K
jQuery makes our lives easier. So much so that it’s tempting to use it all the time, inadvertently slowing our page load times (cue YSlow and Hammerhead). Combining, compressing, and delivering scripts at the end of your page helps in the HTTP request department. On the file size front, below are jQuery plugins that give solid bang for your performance buck.

Undo/Redo in jQuery
An easy-to-use plugin for adding undo/redo capabilities to a jQuery application. It is based loosely on the Objective-C/Cocoa way of doing things.

editease
editEase – jQuery CMS | no fuss, no database, no worries

jsHub
jsHub is a single piece of JavaScript (a “tag”) that can handle reading different sorts of page information and then send them to many different vendors’ products. One piece of code to send to Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends and Mixpanel. Instead of one piece of JavaScript per vendor, jsHub has a single piece of code (the “hub”) and plugins that know how to translate into the required wire protocol for each vendor. Vendors only maintain the plugin for their product.

Educational JavaScript Resources and Tutorials

Caffeinated Simpleton
JavaScript is an amazing little language, but it’s got some quirks that turn a lot of people off. One of those quirks is this, and how it’s not necessarily what you expect it to be. this isn’t that complicated, but there are very few explanations of how it works on the internet. This article is an attempt to explain how this works and how to use it properly.

What You Need To Know About JavaScript Scope
This article discusses how JavaScript handles scope and how various JavaScript libraries provide methods for dealing with it and how they smooth out a few bumps. We’ll also look at how you can get back to basics and do some interesting scope wrangling without a library, a useful approach if you’re writing code that needs to stand alone.

Learning Advanced JavaScript
A very nice tutorial to learn JavaScript, containing code and discussion from the upcoming book Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja by John Resig.

Highlight search terms automagically with JavaScript and mark
Script surrounding the search term(s) with the mark element rather than a span, although the class searchword is retained in case you want to style these marks differently from others. In the CSS, the rule article mark is just added to turn it a gentle shade of pink.

10 Really Helpful Traversing Functions in jQuery
With jQuery, selecting HTML elements is laughably easy. But at times, we may wish to further refine the selection, which can be a hassle when the HTML structure is complicated. In this tutorial, we’ll explore ten ways that we can refine and extend a set of wrapped elements that we wish to operate upon.

Using keyboard shortcuts in Javascript
If you want to enhance your web app, Javascript keyboards shortcuts is definitely something to consider. In this article, you’ll learn to use JS keyboard shortcuts, with and without the JQuery framework.

Code Conventions for the JavaScript Programming Language
This is a set of coding conventions and rules for use in JavaScript programming.

jQuery – Select element cheat sheet
This cheat sheet helps you to find the index of a selected option, set the selected option by value, set the selected option by text, insert a new option before or after another and get the text or value of the selected option.

Compare JavaScript frameworks
Modern Web sites and Web applications tend to rely quite heavily on client-side JavaScript to provide rich interactivity, particularly through the advent of asynchronous HTTP requests that do not require page refreshes to return data or responses from a server-side script or database system. In this article, you will discover how JavaScript frameworks make it easier and faster to create highly interactive and responsive Web sites and Web applications.

Park your Horse, Code Cowboy: Professional JavaScript Workflows, Part 1
In this series, we’ll talk about tools & techniques you can use to cover those No’s, and cut a lot of strife & embarrassment from your JavaScript experience.

JavaScript Reference examples (example source code)
JavaScript Reference examples, organized by Objects, Properties, Methods & Collections. Some Event Handlers Reference are also available.

JavaScript best practices
A compilation of best practices and good advice I’ve amassed over the years, much of it learnt the hard way (experimentation and suchlike). Take the advice below to heart and keep it in a part of your brain that has a quick access route so you can apply it without thinking about it. I am sure you will find things to disagree with, and that is a good thing – you should question what you read, and strive to find better solutions. However, I have found that following these principles has made me a more effective developer and allowed other developers to build upon my work more easily.

wtfjs
JavaScript is a language we love despite it giving us so much to hate. This is a collection of those very special irregularities, inconstancies and just plain painfully unintuitive moments for the language of the web.

Related Posts

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Fresh JavaScript Tools That Will Improve Your Workflow
• 45 Powerful CSS/JavaScript-Techniques
• 70 Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

Poll

What programming language should we cover in next round-up?surveys

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | 63 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: AJAX, javascript, jquery

Alan sez, “A great, but slightly disturbing, look at how pervasive green-screening has become in simply every scene in television these days. Pretty much everything you think is outdoors is faked, at least to some degree. I particularly like the faked ferry fire…”

Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Reel 2009

(Thanks, Alan!)

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Although CSS is generally considered a simple and straightforward language, sometimes it requires creativity, skill and a bit of experimentation. The good news is that designers and developers worldwide often face similar problems and choose to share their insights and workarounds with the wider community.

This is where we come in. We are always looking to collect such articles for our posts so that we can deliver the most useful and relevant content to our readers. In this post, we present an overview of useful CSS/jQuery coding tips, tricks and techniques for visual effects, layouts and web form design to help you find solutions to the problems you are dealing with or will have to deal with in future.

You may want to look at similar CSS-related posts that we published last months:

• 45 Powerful CSS and JavaScript Techniques
• 50 Brilliant CSS3/JavaScript Coding Techniques
• 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

[Offtopic: By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has a mobile version? Try it out if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or another capable device.]

CSS Layouts: Techniques And Workarounds

Facebook Style Footer Admin Panel
Learn how to re-create the Facebook footer admin panel with CSS and jQuery. Also check out part 2.

Adaptable View: How Do They Do It?
This tutorial explains how to manually change a layout, and it shows two great examples and “how they did it.”

Easy Display Switch with CSS and jQuery
A quick and simple way to enable users to switch page layouts using CSS and jQuery.

Quick Tip – Resizing Images Based On Browser Window Size
In fluid layouts, formatting text to adjust smoothly to window size is easy, but images are not as fluid-friendly. This quick tip shows how to switch between two image sizes based on the size of the browser, the DIV or whatever else you choose.

One Page Résumé Site
A clean layout on one page—literally (just one index.html file with optional images). It comes with contact information in microformats and a main area for the resume using a definition list (dl). And it prints well.

Pegs: Automate Display: fixed++
Chris Wetherell posts on Pegs, a strategy for having one scroll bar but independent scrolling areas. After the first one, click on the other items to flip between sizes. You will see that an area’s scroll depends on the configuration.

CSS 100% Height
A common problem among designers is how to get a div to stretch 100% of the window’s height. There are a few different techniques out there, and this tutorial shows one of them.

CSS3 Drop-Down Menu
A clean, simple a nice navigation menu, designed by Nick La.

CSS Trick for a Scrolling Transparent Background Effect
Scroll the page to watch a battle between good and evil take shape. The effect requires two images: one transparent and one tiled gradient image. The gradient scrolls under the transparent PNG. Because it matches the colors in the PNG, each set of images disappears, depending on the part of the gradient they’re on top of.

Fluid Images
By default, an image element that is 500 pixels doesn’t exactly play nice with a container as large as 800 pixels or one as small as 100. What’s a designer to do?

Scroll/Follow Sidebar, Multiple Techniques
A really simple concept: the sidebar follows you as you scroll down the page. There are a number of ways to go about it. Two are covered here: CSS and JavaScript (jQuery), with a bonus CSS trick.

Vertical Centering With CSS
There are a few different ways to vertically center objects using CSS, but choosing the right one can be difficult. Here is a list of the best ways and an explanation of how to create a nice centered website.

Create YouTube-like adaptable view using CSS and jQuery
Other than the “Turn off the lights” feature, YouTube has great stuff, such as the “change view” feature, which allows you to switch between normal and wide mode, thus expanding or shrinking the video area. Creating this is very simple.

How To Create a Horizontally Scrolling Site
If websites were made of wood, the grain would run up and down. Vertical is the natural flow of the Web. But browsers are equipped with vertical and horizontal scroll bars, right? We have the choice to go against the grain and create web pages that scroll primarily horizontally and that even expand horizontally to accommodate more content. Perhaps a slight blow to usability, but a cool creative touch nonetheless!

Purely CSS – Faking Minimum Margins
min-margin is non-existent in the CSS world. After you’ve pondered and Googled it, check out the solution here.

Create Sidebars of Equal Height with Faux Columns
CSS can be tricky business. Creating columns of equal height, where the content in one column is longer than the content in another, is frustrating. Here’s where the faux-column technique can help. Find out how this solution makes even the most complicated layout a breeze to code.

Setting Equal Heights with jQuery
Here is a script to match the heights of boxes in the same container and create a tidy grid, with little overhead.

Quick Tip: Centered Fake Floats
There were ways to center-align left-floated elements, but then inline-block became popular and everything changed. After a bit of tinkering, Zaharenia Atzitzikaki found an efficient and (mostly) cross-browser-compatible way to center elements without floats.

6 Flexible jQuery Plugins to Control Web Page Layouts Easily
A collection of six jQuery plug-ins to manage page layouts easily.

Four Methods to Create Equal-Height Columns
This article discusses ways to create equal-height columns that work in all major browsers (including IE6). All of the methods show how to create a three-column layout.

How to: CSS Large Background
A tutorial with various CSS examples for how to create a large background using either a single image or double images.

A Nice Little CSS Positioning Technique
Here, we have a basic unordered list (ul), with left-floated images where the text doesn’t wrap under the images. Of course, this technique could be deployed in loads of other instances.

Perfect Full Page Background Image
This technique allows an image to fill the page, with no white space. The image scales as needed and retains its proportions, without triggering scroll bars.

Smart Columns With CSS and jQuery
In observing liquid-width websites, Soh Tanaka sees two common techniques for displaying columns: fixed columns and liquid columns. He points out the drawbacks of both and pitches his solution.

Images And Visual Effects With CSS

A Beautiful Apple-Style Slideshow Gallery With CSS and jQuery
Create an Apple-like slideshow gallery, similar to the one used on Apple’s website to showcase products. It works entirely in the front end; no PHP or databases required.

Rolling a coke can around with pure CSS
Román Cortés is having a lot of fun doing CSS tricks these days. He just built a rolling coke can that uses background-attachment, background-position and a few other tricks to achieve the effect. No fancy CSS3 needed here!

Grayscale Hover Effect With CSS and jQuery
A few months ago, James Padolsey introduced a cool grayscale technique for non-IE browsers. His technique inspired Soh Tanaka to come up with a workaround with a similar effect. His solution relies on CSS Sprites and a few lines of jQuery, but it requires a bit of preparation before implementation. It is not recommended for large-scale projects; it is probably best for portfolio pieces.

Codename Rainbows
Some JavaScript and CSS magic is used here to apply a two-color gradient to text. Shadows and highlights can also be applied. This works especially well on big websites and for dynamic content where creating images for every instance would be impractical.

3 Easy and Fast CSS Techniques for Faux Image Cropping
This article summarizes three fast and easy CSS techniques for displaying only a portion of an image. All of the techniques need only a couple of lines of CSS. You are not literally cropping, which is why it’s called faux image cropping. These techniques can be helpful if you want to keep images to a certain size (for example, thumbnails in a news section). Being able to use CSS to control which portion of an image to display is great.

Image Rollover Borders That Do Not Change Layout
With CSS, the border of any block-level element is factored into the element’s size in the layout. So, if you add a border to an element on hover, the layout will shift. In this post, you will find how to use the regular border property and create inner borders to get around that.

Horizontal Stripes
This tutorial shows you how to create never ending horizontal stripes in your web design using CSS.

Nine Techniques for CSS Image Replacement
Put nine different techniques of image replacement to the test.

Bokeh effects with CSS3 and jQuery
This tutorial teaches you how to re-create the bokeh effect with CSS 3. With some help from jQuery, we can add some randomness in colour, size and position for the effect.

A Stationary Logo That Changes on Page Scroll with CSS
Here is an interesting effect that modifies the logo when the page is scrolled, using the CSS background-attachment property.

Silhouette Fade-Ins
To achieve the effect in the image above, first we need a DIV with the silhouettes as a background image. Then we put four images in that DIV, all the exact same size, with each band member highlighted. These images are hidden by default. Then you absolutely position four regions on top of the DIV; these are the roll-over link areas. With jQuery, we apply hover events to them, fading in the appropriate image.

Creating Triangles in CSS
Few people realize that a browser draws borders at angles. This technique takes advantage of that. One side of the border is given the color of the arrow, and the rest are transparent. Then you give the border a large width; the ones above are 20 pixels.

A parallax optical illusion with CSS: The Horse in Motion
Time for some fun with CSS and optical illusions.

Pure CSS Line Graph
The idea here is not only to offer data visualization to people who aren’t comfortable using scripting languages, but to demonstrate the power of CSS and offer a different way of using CSS. If you are not a fan of line graphs and data visualization, you may still benefit from this article. Think of it as a CSS experiment, and learn a thing or two about CSS Sprites and positioning.

Zooming with jQuery and CSS
This post is about text zooming with jQuery and CSS. This is a basic-level tutorial about changing a style using a jQuery script. A simple way to zoom website content.

Create Resizing Thumbnails Using Overflow Property
This tutorial teaches you how to control thumbnail sizes. Sometimes we don’t have enough space to fit large thumbnails, and yet we would rather avoid small indecipherable images. Using this trick, we can limit the default dimensions of thumbnails and show them at full size when the user mouses over them.

Cross-browser drop shadows using pure CSS
Most methods of adding drop-shadows to content blocks require additional HTML mark-up and one or more PNG images. But by combining the Glow and Shadow filters, something that fairly closely resembles the rendered CSS3 shadow can be achieved.

Date Badges and Comment Bubbles for Your Blog
One of the things you have to deal with when your blog grows is having to cram more info into less space to show everything you want to show. One thing you can do is add an icon for the date and then a bubble over it with the number of comments for that post.

CSS Tables And Web Forms

UX trick: display form data as tabular data
This is a little trick to enhance the user experience of forms. It displays editable form data as readable tabular data.

Tables: Not As Evil As You Think
Tables are evil, right? Yes and no. For tabular data, they’re not, of course. That’s what tables are for in the first place. CSS can do an excellent job of styling a properly formatted table, and the table structure provides good scaffolding for JavaScript calls. But what is addressed here is using tables for non-tabular data (i.e. for the layout). Yes, that’s right: using tables for layout.

Perfect Drop-Down Log-In Box Like Twitter Using jQuery
This shows you how to create a Twitter-style drop-down log-in form using jQuery. It’s really easy, it saves space on the page and visitors feel comfortable with the awesome toggle form.

Make a Select’s Options Printable
When printing a Web page with select elements on it, the select drop-down prints just as it looks on the Web. This of course is practically useless on the printed page. One option for handling this is to follow every select HTML element with an unordered list that duplicates the content. Hide the unordered list in your main CSS file and reveal it with your print style sheet. This is a reasonable approach, except that it’s a big ol’ pain in the butt to deal with all the time. Let’s rely on jQuery to do the heavy lifting instead.

Twitter-Like Log-In With jQuery and CSS
This post explains how to get the Twitter-like hide and show effect for logging in using jQuery and CSS.” Very simple: just five lines of JavaScript for the hide() and show() events and a little CSS.

Clean and Pure CSS Form Design
This tutorial illustrates how to design a pure CSS form without using HTML tables.

CSSG Collection: Free Comment Styles
This is the second CSSG collection from CSS Globe.

Have a Field Day with HTML5 Forms
Here is a look at how to style a beautiful HTML5 form using some advanced CSS and the latest CSS3 techniques. You will definitely want to re-style your forms after having read this article.

Editable/Printable Invoice
Create editable and printable invoices using CSS and some JavaScript. This is version 2 from Vinh Pham.

How to Mask Passwords Like the iPhone
Many smartphones, including the iPhone, show the last character that you typed in a password field with a delay of a second or two. You can see that last character but not the entire password. But browsers don’t do what these mobile devices do. Here is a solution, with some fancy JavaScript and behind-the-scenes trickery.

Make Web Forms Suck Less With Labels
We’ve been filling out Web forms for years, and we all gripe that they could be better. Even with generous padding, the fields are too small. But hardly anyone has improved the most under-rated interaction of them all: checkboxes and radio buttons.

FancyForm: JavaScript checkbox replacement
FancyForm is a powerful and flexible checkbox-replacement script that changes the appearance and function of HTML form elements. It is accessible and easy to use, and it degrades gracefully on older non-supported browsers.

jQuery checkbox v.1.3.0 Beta 1
A lightweight custom-styled checkbox implementation for jQuery 1.2.x and 1.3.x.

Disabled labels and the Trilemma plug-in
The form above on the left makes use of the disabled attribute, but the default browser settings for disabled inputs don’t contrast as much as one would like. To better distinguish at a glance between which inputs are disabled and enabled, the labels of disabled inputs in the form on the right are styled with a faint gray color.

Fluid Search Box
Creating a fluid search box when you have only a single element next to it is trivial. What you should do is wrap the input in an element and use padding to create space for the fixed element; then position the fixed element absolutely (or relatively) in the space created by the padding.

Last Click

Browser Pong
A whole new pong game using three browser windows for the ball and racquets. Clever!

Related posts

You may want to look at similar CSS-related posts that we published last months:

• 45 Powerful CSS and JavaScript Techniques
• 50 Brilliant CSS3/JavaScript Coding Techniques
• 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

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© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | 48 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: CSS, jquery

The short answer is “as much as you need”. The more tactical answer is “as much as you can raise cheaply”. The latter is a pragmatic view. Raise more than you need when times are good. Just because you raise it does not mean you need to spend it – capital efficiency is always good!

In this post I look at what VC are saying SaaS ventures need to raise to get to scale and profitability. But I’ll also look at what VC are doing – what SaaS deals they are funding currently. I look at the capital efficiency drivers, what you can do to reduce your need for capital. And finally, I show you which VC are active in SaaS today.

Sponsor

What Are VC Saying?

The answer according to Bruce Cleveland of Interwest is about $40m.

Take that seriously. Cleveland is a SaaS specialist with serious operational experience who has done his research on this subject. But as he points out, the details matter. There are two points of caution:

1. This is looking in the rear view mirror at ventures funded some time ago that did an IPO in 2007 or earlier. It is a different world today – less capital available and less need for capital.
2. VC are happy with models that require a lot of capital. Capital is what they have to offer and if you need a lot they are in the driving seat.

Lets look at the operational details, the capital efficiency drivers, in a minute. First, lets see what VC are actually funding today.

What Are VC Doing?

We looked at the Series A round for 17 SaaS ventures that closed after January 2007:

• Clarizen
• Maxplore
• Loopfuse
• Jive Software
• SlideRocket
• Elastra
• Syncplicity
• SocialCast
• AriaSystems
• Lavante
• Lithium Technologies
• Maxplore
• PivotLink
• SmartTurn
• Zuberance
• InsideView
• Bill.com

These 17 ventures raised $90.25 million total, an average of $5.3 million. That sounds like the “old normal” $5 million Series A. You can see how you would get to $40 million for a venture that is getting traction and can do a series of larger rounds at higher valuations. Lets say, a) $5 million; b) $10 million; c) $25 million; and total: $40m.

If the C round is pre IPO, everybody does well. But that is the old normal. The new normal is different. First, those 17 deals had two outliers: Jive raised $15 million and Bill.com raised $17 million.

Now let’s start with a later date. If we filter by Series A deals that were done after the market meltdown in Q4 2008, the average more than halves to $2.55 million. Those five deals are:

• Maxplore
• Loopfuse
• Syncplicity
• Zuberance
• SocialCast

Capital Efficiency Drivers

There are two numbers to obsess over.

1. How much does it cost to acquire customers? Cleveland defines this as CAC/ACV, or Customer Acquisition Cost divided by Annual Contract Value. If this is less than one you are in good shape. You can take this further. If you can get your customers to pre-pay for the year and your CAC/ACV is less than one, you can self-finance growth at least on the marketing side. Charging annually rather than monthly will slow down growth but that would be a small price to pay for controlling your own destiny. In some markets, customers will pre-pay in return for a discount and that is certainly the cheapest capital you will ever get.

2. How much do you need to spend per customer on infrastructure? The SaaS pioneers made a big play out of having their own data centers. When SaaS/Cloud was new, this was essential. Today you will be courted by lots of big, deep-pocketed, credible cloud vendors selling PaaS, IaaS and HaaS on a pay-as-you-go basis. The pay-as-you-go basis means you don’t spend precious capex on infrastrucure.

But more important is the total ICC or Infrastructure Cost per Customer. If this is low enough you can afford to be more creative with your freemium strategies – which will reduce your CAC/ACV if done right. In other words, your R&D guys had better pay attention to performance engineering from the get go. The days of throwing sloppy code out there and covering your mistakes with huge dollops of cash later are probably over.

Who You Gonna Call? SaaS Funders!

You need capital to build a SaaS venture. You can self-finance using the cash flow from another business. (Typically a professional services business as this requires no capital.) This is what both 37 Signals and Zoho/Advent did. But that is still capital, it is just your own capital!

If you have a small niche, you might need very little capital as it is easy to reach your market. Which is a good thing as no VC will fund a small niche. If you are have a venture that is in that rare magic quadrant that is both viral and monetizable… well you are one lucky dude!

For SaaS ventures that are going after a big market and have normal marketing characteristics, VC (probably preceded by Angel) is the conventional route. If you do decide to raise VC for your SaaS venture, it is better to go to a SaaS specialist.

We know this is not an exhaustive list. It is not meant to be. We have seen many VCs do one or two SaaS deals. We want to highlight the VCs that have done more than that, and that have an active focus on SaaS (a section on their site, a partner focused on SaaS, some interesting research, etc.). These are the ones that made that cut:

• Bay Partners
• Benchmark
• Bessemer
• Emergence
• HummerWinblad
• Interwest
• Northbridge
• TrueVentures
• Venrock

What you really need to know is, who is funding SaaS ventures right now. Here is the much shorter list of VC that have done two or more SaaS A Series deals since the start of 2007:

• Emergence
• TrueVentures
• HummerWinblad
• Venrock

OK, let’s make a really fine filter. Who has done SaaS A Series deals since the market meltdown in Q4 2008? That list is down to two firms:

• Emergence
• TrueVentures

In raising money, relationships matter – a lot. So if you know a VC that is not yet active in SaaS, call them. If your venture puts them on the SaaS map, they will love you. For most VC that like Internet or software like SaaS, the business model attractions are screamingly obvious.

Photo credit: Mokra
Discuss

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CSS and JavaScript are extremely powerful tools for designers and developers. However, sometimes it’s difficult to come up with the one excellent idea that would solve a problem that you are facing right now. Good news: almost every day designers and developers come up with fresh and clever CSS tricks and techniques and share them with other developers online. We regularly collect all these tricks, filter them, sort them, revise them and prepare them for Smashing Magazine readers.

In this post we present 45 useful CSS/JavaScript-techniques that may help you find clever solutions to some of your problems or just get inspired by what is possible with CSS. We cover interesting CSS-techniques, navigation menus, CSS typography, CSS lists and CSS buttons. The focus of this post lies on CSS; please notice that some of the techniques use JavaScript or PHP for enhanced functionality.

Please notice that this is the first part of our large round-up of fresh CSS/JavaScript-techniques. Other techniques (CSS tables, CSS layouts, CSS for Mobile and CSS forms) will be featured in an upcoming article. So don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter for similar articles and a stream of useful resources. Please also let us know what we should change or improve in our future posts!

We are aware that many readers are tired of “lists” floating around in the Web, but we are confident that the vast majority of our visitors will benefit from this post format and will find at least some of the techniques featured in this post useful.

By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has one of the most influential and popular Twitter accounts? Join our discussions and get updates about useful tools and resources — follow us on Twitter.

Interesting CSS Techniques

Building the New Visual Annotations
These note overlays are composed of two main elements, an overlay with the shine and a border with the transparency. A very interesting, yet simple technique by the ZURB Design Agency, designers who have written a series of articles on Smashing Magazine as well.

Sexy Music Album Overlays
This aticle shows how to style your music streams and provides you some graphics to do so.

A Colorful Clock With CSS & jQuery
This tutorial describes how one can create a clock using basic CSS and JavaScript.

How To Create Depth And Nice 3D Ribbons Only Using CSS3
We will use box-shadow to create a drop-shadow with RGBa, a color model that allows an optimized contrast with any kind of backgrounds. RGBa is the standard RGB model (0,0,0 – 255,255,255) and it adds the last option (a) for the opacity. We can use this model also for other properties and it works with the new browser.

Advanced Event Timeline With PHP, CSS & jQuery
This Advanced Event Timeline is used with the help of PHP, MySQL, CSS and jQuery. The result: a nice time line with clickable events. Adding new ones is going to be as easy as inserting a row in the database.

CSS Navigation Menus

CSS 3D Meninas
“I’ve took the classic paint The Maids of Honour (Las Meninas) and created a CSS pseudo-3D / Parallax effect. It is pure CSS, no JavaScript or Flash is involved. It has been tested and is working on Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Opera 9, Safari 3, Chrome 4 and Konqueror 3.5, and it validates, too.

Sproing! – Make An Elastic Thumbnail Menu
“In an ongoing attempt to offer alternative methods to spruce up menus, I’ve pieced together an elastic thumbnail menu. It magnifies menu items when they are hovered over and menu items expand upwards.

How to Create Simple and Effective Sub Navs with Definition Lists
“When we need simple and effective on-page navigation, to either jump to content on the page or flip to another view, we use the dl element. Its sub elements, the dt and dd, make it very easy for us to create inline links with a clear label. Here we’re going to share with you a fast, lightweight method for how we’ll use CSS to do it.”

Sticky SideNav Layout with CSS
Learn how to create a fixed sidenav layout for your blog or website. Having a fixed sidenav comes in handy when dealing with blog style websites where the content is extremely tall and there is a need for good amount of scrolling. The fixed navigation allows the user to cruise through the content without scrolling back up to the top to navigate through the rest of the site.

Unobtrusive Dropdown Page Changer
Using a <select> dropdown menu to create navigation isn’t as common as it once was, but it’s still around. It got ripped on pretty good for being an inaccessible / obtrusive. Indeed a lot of the scripts you’ll find out there for creating a menu like this are this way. Bummer. Let’s make one that works with or without JavaScript.

CSS Navigation: No JavaScript, jQuery or Image Required, Free CSS Navigation / Pagination with Tooltip
CSS-based navigation / pagination bar without JavaScript. There is a tooltip on hover for the ‘previous’ and ‘next’ page’s bullets that makes navigation easier.

How to Code an Overlapping Tabbed Main Menu
Main navigation menu is that part of a website design that makes the whole site look lively and complete. But the most common type of navigation menu style still being used a lot is the tabbed navigation menu. Here is a tutorial on how to code an overlapping tabbed menu.

Solution For Very Long Dropdown Menus
“I like to be confident with post titles, but the reality in this case is a possible solution for very long dropdowns. The problem with long dropdowns is that the dropdown itself can go below the “fold” of the website. That is, below the visible area of the browser window. So in order to access those menu items down below, you need to scroll your browser window. For those of us with scroll wheels of some kind on our mice (mouses?), it’s not a big deal. For those without, those lower menu items are totally inaccessible, because to use the browser scrollbar means mousing off the menu (and probably having it close).”

Mega Drop Down Menu w/ CSS & jQuery
When used properly, mega drop down menus can be quite efficient for large scale websites. Let’s experiment with different ways of implementing this technique. A tutorial by Soh Tanaka, Smashing Magazine’s regular author.

CSS Typography and Body Copy

How to Create a Cool Anaglyphic Text Effect with CSS
Anaglyphs are those amazing 3D images that are created by offsetting two of the red, green and blue channels, and are viewed with those nerdy looking 3D glasses with different coloured lenses. I don’t know if this effect works for real, as I’ve unfortunately misplaced my 3D specs, but it’s a pretty cool text effect nevertheless! Let’s take a look at how a similar style can be created for sprucing up your web designs, while taking into consideration semantics and avoiding the repetition of any markup.

Typographic work planner
Enter this, a little HTML/CSS typographic work planner. By using some super-semantic HTML and a dash of CSS you can craft a beautiful looking yet incredibly simple work planner for you and your staff.

Thinning Text in Webkit (Safari)
Safari has a not-so-lovely way of bulking up text using sub-pixel rendering. On previous versions of Safari, this was fixed with a text-shadow declaration, but since Snow Leopard that method no longer works. Fortunately, there is an alternative.

Pseudo Drop Caps
They’ve been around for a while now, appearing in magazines, print and now the web. Designers and developers alike have experimented with multiple workarounds from using inline styles to using image replacement but with both of these solutions there are problems. For example, what happens when you recreate your site and decide that you no longer want to upload the drop cap images, you’re now going to left with a broken image at the start of every single post that you had previously created, this is obviously assuming you haven’t used text-indent. If you decided to go down on the inline style route then your are just bad, just very bad.

How to Create Perfect Pre Tags
If you operate a website that features lots of code examples, you know how important it is to spend some quality time styling the &tl;pre> element. When left unstyled, wild <pre> tags will mangle your preformatted content and destroy your site’s layout. Different browsers treat the <pre> tag quite differently, varying greatly in their default handling of font-sizing, scrollbar-rendering, and word-wrapping. Indeed, getting your preformatted code to look consistent, usable, and stylish across browsers is no easy task, but it certainly can be done. This article explains everything you need to create proper <pre> tags.

Improve your web typography with baseline shift
The baseline is an invisible line onto which all type characters sit, although of course some characters (including ‘j’, ‘p’, ‘g’ and ‘y’) have descenders that hang below the baseline. Baseline shift involves moving characters up or down in relation to the baseline and using it effectively can make a huge difference to the professional look of your type. Although baseline shift has traditionally been a part of using tools like InDesign or Quark, there are ways to accomplish the same results using CSS.

Typograph – Scale & Rhythm
This page is both an essay and a tool. It sets out to explore how two, intertwined concepts, often playful but sometimes cheeky, can be encouraged to dance in web pages. Drag the colored boxes along the scale to throw these words anew. For the most part, this text is just a libretto for the performance you are about to play upon it.

Fancy Quotes With jQuery, AJAX & CSS
Learn how to create a fancy quote rating system that will display a number of famous quotes and will enable site visitors to rate their favorites.

How To Create Simple, Stylish and Swappable Image Captions
Most image caption solutions require a lot of excessive HTML, make it difficult to redesign or don’t communicate clearly that they belong to an image. Let’s see what we can do to address these problems.

Styling photo captions with CSS
Sure, some photos are self-explanatory, but most photos are best served with text captions. It’s true for traditional media like newspapers and magazines, and just as true for blog posts and web articles. Here’s a quick tip on using photo captions and styling them nicely with the magic of CSS.

Image captions on Web pages
This document suggests three ways of presenting an image with a caption in HTML. Styling in CSS is also discussed.

Styling Post Headings That Stick Out
“Recently, I’ve noticed a trend in blog post headings where it sticks out of its base layout. I would like to share this technique for those who would like to give their post headings a new style. One tip to keep in mind when designing this is to make sure it fits your target audience screen resolution size. Note that this technique may vary depending on your design. My goal is for you to grasp the main concept in this tutorial so you can experiment and apply it to your own projects.”

Using ellipsis with HTML and CSS
If the text is too wide to fit into a container, a nice solution can be to have ellipsis to show there’s more information available. While not currently part of the official HTML specifications, it is possible to have ellipsis defined in CSS and it works for Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Opera. It doesn’t work for Firefox but there’s a workaround that can be done with jQuery.

5 Message Boxes to Style your Notifications with CSS
This article presents free notification boxes to use/customize as well as a very simple technique to create your own ones inspired from this roundup.

CSS Lists

Create a Microsoft Word-Style Outline with CSS
As you can see, the browser doesn’t bother to vary the indentation style much, or change the list type from roman numerals to alphabetical characters and so on… all the things we’re so used to seeing because Microsoft Word and other writing programs do them by default. So let’s use a bit of CSS ingenuity to make a Microsoft Word-styled outline using ordered lists!

Pure CSS Timeline
“I wanted to build a CSS timeline for the “About” section of my site while using some clean and simple markup. I wanted to avoid using images as much as possible, so I spent a few minutes prototyping some options and came up with a solution using unordered lists. The result is a simple and clean looking timeline with some very straight forward markup. In this article I’ll share my approach to creating a timeline out of CSS and HTML which results in a nice looking, simple timeline.”

Automatic numbering with CSS Counters
When writing documents, it is often useful to number sections and have a table of contents. You can number these by hand, directly in the markup, but this can be time consuming if the order changes and you have to edit all the numbers. CSS2.1 gives us a automated way to generate numbers using CSS counters, and this article will walk you through how to use them. One word of note before we start is that CSS counters are not yet implemented in IE, although they are on the roadmap for IE8.

CSS tricks for custom bullets

Elastic Calendar Styling with CSS
A traditional calendar is a grid of numbered boxes on a page. As a web designer, you might go right for a table, and I wouldn’t fault you for that. Tables, though, can sometimes be tough to muscle into shape. The CSS purist in me gets pissed when I set the width of a table (or a cell) and it decides it knows better and grows or shrinks as it sees fit.
You can tackle calendar styling with pure CSS, and I feel it makes just as much sense semantically as a table does. What is a calender, if not an ordered list of days? By using CSS, we can even do some cool things like do all our sizing with ems so our calendar layout will be elastic. That is, grow in both width and height when text is resized in browsers, while greatly increasing accessibility.

Style a List with One Pixel
A one-pixel background image can be a pretty versatile thing. With repeat-x it can be a horizontal line, repeat-y makes a vertical line, and repeat makes it a fill color. Just as a little fun proof of concept, we can use that to create a depth-chart looking unordered list.

Style Your Ordered List
By default, most browsers display the ordered list numbers same font style as the body text. Here is a quick CSS tutorial on how you can use the ordered list (ol) and paragraph (p) element to design a stylish numbered list.

Simulating a Table Using an Unordered List
Your first question immediately might be, “why would I want to simulate a table with a list, why not just use a table?” With the raise in popularity of AJAX sortable list elements, using list items to represent a multiple column data table can allow for easy sorting of various more “tabley” information. So let’s get started.

8 different ways to beautifully style your HTML lists with CSS
“The use of HTML lists (<ol> for an ordered list, <ul> for an unordered list) is very common these days. Today, we’re going to look a little bit further than creating regular lists, by showing 8 different ways to beautifully style your HTML lists with CSS. We’ll use some pure CSS techniques to make a bored list look awesome (and even have some extra functionality).”

Quick Tip – Simplify List Margins with CSS
Have you ever set default margins for a layout, and then had to go back and manually adjust all of your lists? By default, list item markers have a negative positioning in relationship to the list item itself. This means that zero-ing out margins automatically leads to an overflow if the list is contained inside anything else. Wouldn’t it be easier to put the list item marker at the same starting point as other elements instead? Lucky for us, there’s a style to help do just that. Let’s see what can be done with the list-style-position property.

Sexy HTML List Tricks
Behold the ubiquitous list elements, <ul> and <ol>. These two sexy elements help millions of websites display lists of information in clean, semantic fashion. Without them, we’d be crawling around like filthy cavemen, eating dirt and howling at the moon. But these list elements aren’t just sexy, they are also extremely flexible, enabling us humble designers to create robust list configurations that are semantically versatile and highly customizable.

Clickable <li>
I originally coded the markup to be a table, but discovered a problem when I tried to make the whole row clickable. I ended up with a list of articles instead.

CSS Buttons

Simply-Buttons v2
This technique presents buttons of the size that always fits the content. There are 3 states: inactive, active and hover. The technique works in all major browsers and doesn’t require JavaScript.

How to make sexy buttons with CSS
This tutorial will teach you how to create pretty looking textual buttons (with alternate pressed state) using CSS. Dynamic buttons save you heaps of time otherwise spent creating graphics and will basically make you a happier person at the end of the day.

Liquid & Color Adjustable CSS Buttons
When working on a large site with multiple buttons, it can be quite tedious to make all the buttons in Photoshop. Making future adjustments on the verbiage and colors can be also be time consuming. By having dynamic buttons, this scenario is much easier to handle, and by having liquid and color adjustable buttons with CSS, we are able to change the verbiage and colors in a flash.

Create a Button with Hover and Active States using CSS Sprites
Too many designers neglect the click state (active-property in CSS) in web design, either because they’re unaware of it, underestimate the importance of it or are plain lazy. It’s a simple effect that improves usability by giving the user some feedback as to what they’ve clicked on but can also add depth to a design.

Recreating the button
“I thought it would be interesting to provide a portion of the background on buttons here, and discuss some of the iterations we’ve been through so far to get to the current state.”

Rounded form buttons

Google’s Imageless Buttons
An interesting discussion about various buttons design techniques to reconstruct Google’s imageless buttons.

Stay tuned!

This is the first part of our large round-up of fresh CSS/JavaScript-techniques. Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter for similar articles and a stream of useful resources. Please also let us know what we should change or improve in our future posts!

Would you like to see more similar round-ups on Smashing Magazine in the future?(answers)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | 64 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: CSS, javascript, js

One of the things that we’ve been focusing on lately has been building tools to better manage our products and services. It’s amazing what a well designed tool can tell you about your business. When I say “tool”, I’m referring to an application. Whether it be a web app, a desktop app or even a simple spreadsheet, creating a good “tool” that can help you leverage data that you’ve collected, or even help you collect data to analyze is a great thing to have.

For example, our F-MyLife application leverages multiple ad networks to fill it’s inventory. It currently uses the AdWhirl SDK to do this and it worked great for a while; however, our buddies over at MobClix built a much better ad aggregation platform with far more networks and we’ve since moved most of our traffic to MobClix so they can manage it. Since the AppStore is a pain in the ass and getting an update out would have taken weeks, we were able to allocate all of our traffic to MobClix via AdWhirl and MobClix’s new platform was able to handle everything from there. We ran our ads like this for over a month and then we started noticing a dropoff in our revenue. We scrambled to find out what the problem was, but since we were filtering through data from multiple networks, it was nearly impossible to put two and two together.

We decided that in order to analyze all of this data and really see connections between everything, we were going to need to build something. So Shaun spent a few nights working on a web application that pulled in all of our data from all of our networks so it could be analyzed and displayed in a readable format along with some charts. This was a huge life saver. After reviewing the reports that we built for ourselves, we noticed a huge problem with our click-through rates and began working with everyone to resolve them.

Had we not built this tool, we probably would of never known the real cause of the issue. In fact, had we built this tool a month ago, we would of identified the bug earlier and we could have fixed it.

You don't always need to "roll your own solution" though. There are tons of products and services out there designed to fix problems just like yours, you just need to research them and set them up. A similar scenario occurred with our servers. We run FML/TWI & ProTip on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure and we monitor everything with Pingdom. The other night, we had a 6 hour downtime between 2am EDT and 8am EDT. The problem was remedied by a simple lighttpd restart; however, during that time, we lost a lot of revenue. This wasn’t the first time that this happened either! So, yesterday, we setup Scoutapp to keep an eye on our server load and monitor some other metrics (like MySQL). When we woke up, we were greeted with a bunch of alerts from Scoutapp telling us that we had 1 SQL query which was taking an awfully long time to run and bogging down the server. We logged in, identified the query, figured out why it was taking so long to run and remedied the problem by adding an index to one of our tables. Done!

If it weren’t for Scoutapp, we would of had to manually log into each server, every morning and manually check the slow query logs. This is painstaking and given that we’re a small company with hundreds of things in the works at any given time, we don’t have the free time available to check logs. Scoutapp saw a problem, let us know about it, and we fixed it. A tool saved our ass yet again.

This happens over and over in the software development business. After you’re done with the product, and it makes you a little bit of money, you NEED to build or setup tools that can help you manage your new business. If you don’t, you’ll spend all of your time managing your first product instead of working on your next.

Heartbeat was the first tool we built to manage our AppStore products. It’s been a great asset to us and after having had over a year of experience on the AppStore, we’re working on Heartbeat 3.0 which will incorporate all of the knowledge that we’ve gained through the past year.

It seems counter-productive when you’re a small company, but that’s when these little things help the most. You don’t have the time to do it all, so it’s important to automate as much of your business as possible. Services like Pingdom and Scoutapp have helped us maintain uptime on our servers. Others like Sifter and Tender have helped us keep track of bugs and deal with support issues from our customers.

There are a ton of other products and services out there that can help you run your business. If you can’t find one to meet your specific needs, spend some time, and build your own. Trust me, you’ll thank yourself in the long run.

Did you know that this kind of thing was even possible? The video shows Danny MacAskill. who rides for UK trials bike company Inspired Bicycles, shredding it in Edinburgh. As our own Danny Dumas says on Twitter*, “From what I gather this is parkour…done with bicycles.”

Keep watching. If you think it’s all over after the first couple of minutes, it isn’t. The video just gets bigger and better as it goes on.

Inspired Bicycles – Danny MacAskill April 2009 [YouTube via Danny Doom]

Product page [Inspired Bikes]

*Normally, of course, Danny’s answer to the Twitter question “What are you doing?” is “Styling my hair. My beautiful hair. In the mirror.”