Nicolas has one of those web design blogs that everybody should subscribe to. He explains things with a thoroughness and understanding that we all should strive for. I caught up with Nicolas to ask him some questions about the future of the web, his life, and if he had any advice for others.
Reader Paul writes in:
What’s the difference between
.container div { }anddiv.container { }?
It’s great you are asking questions like this Paul. The answer is very important to understanding CSS, because these two selectors select very different things. This is pretty similar to this question from a while back.
Perhaps a good way to explain their difference is reason them out in “plain English”.
I recently noticed a subtle and nice effect in the Google Chrome UI. As you mouse over inactive tabs, they light up a bit, but also have a gradient highlight that follows your mouse as you move around on them.
The guys from DOCTYPE told me it was their inspiration for the navigation on their website. They are doing it just like I would have, with CSS3 gradients and jQuery. So I decided to snag their code…
Have you ever wanted to absolutely or relatively position a table cell? Well, I can’t help you there. Table cell elements just won’t take those position values. And thus, you also can’t absolutely position elements within the context of those elements either. I can help you out with that issue.
Got a couple of slightly-oldie-but-goodies for you:
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Google Chrome is dropping support for the video codec H.264. Kinda feels like an Apple vs. Google pissing match as H.264 is so heavily used by Apple and WebM was developed by Google.
For HTML5 video, this is how it seems like it shakes down to me:
Now:
H.264 - Chrome, Safari, Mobile Safari
Ogg Theora - Firefox, Opera
Near Future:
WebM - Chrome, Firefox, Opera, IE 9
H.264 - Safari, Mobile Safari
Still only need to provide in two formats to get pretty good coverage. If Safari can get on the WebM bandwagon we'd be all set, but don't hold in your farts till that happens.
From the source code:
this site is by Paul Irish
i made it cuz hsla is wayyyy cooler than rgba and more sensible too!
HSL is better than RGB. The reason it isn't used as much (according to me) is because you can't get HSL color values out of Photoshop. Hence, tools like this and my own.
Lea Verou with a clever idea on using CSS3 gradients that repeat (by setting background size) to create striped and checkboard backgrounds with no images.
Follow along as we use a few very simple CSS3 transitions to create a "slideup" box effect. Roll over the box with your mouse, and the title of the box slides out of the way and a more descriptive stylized box of information jockeys its way into place. This is supported in modern version of Gecko, WebKit, and Opera browsers. No Internet Explorer support yet, but no fallback is needed, the link works and the information shows as expected.
