February 8, 2007, 11:28 am
CSS Sandbox
by Henry Woodbury
Filed under: Implementation, Web Interface Design
Smashing Magazine has a list of 53 CSS Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without.
Despite some dead links and the parody-inviting title, it’s a good resource. Most of the designers to whom the article links offer well-designed code; many provide thoughtful explanations of why you would even bother with it.
One example is the list of tricks to generate rounded corners with CSS. I’ve run across some of these in the past and been unimpressed. A CSS technique that requires javascript or a dagwood sandwich of nested tags makes me suspicious. Yet if you continue on to Greg Johnson’s Spiffy Corners site, you find a reasonably efficient sandwich with thoughtful reference to alternate approaches:
There are solutions for rounded corners using pure CSS. There are solutions that create anti-aliased corners. There are solutions that don’t require JavaScript. But to my knowledge, there has yet to be a pure CSS solution for rounded corners that does not require images or JavaScript.
Herein lies the value of the list. Most of Smashing’s life-saving techniques are good only for spot use, but spending a little time with the code and commentary can give a web designer a lot of insight into how different CSS attributes interact.
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