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Things They Never Tell You In Css School

The best thing about css is its ability to leave your head numb and your knuckles aching from whacking your monitor in the eye.

Things I should Do Instead

Image of post it note with to do list
  • Learn to write PHP that does not return errors.
  • Sleep more.
  • Things that don't require me to sit at a computer.
  • Use tables.
  • Preach about “Semantics” like everyone else around here.
  • Use tables when a DIV doesn't cut the mustard.

CSS: stuff nightmares are made of

#rightcol { 
position:relative;
vertical-align:top; 
width: 18%;
margin-left: 3.6%; 
display: inline-block; 
padding-left:2em; 
text-align:left;
}

Here's some wise advise.

“Oh, what a tangled website we weave when first we practice.”

TutorialS

This site is not merely created to show off stuff that I have done but also to assist other people with their design.

I hope that you will find some information here that will be helpfull to you. If there are any errors in the information please do let me know so that I can make changes to ensure the info I am providing is accurate. I can only hope that you can learn something here.

Now let's get on with business!

What is CSS ?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It allows for much richer document appearances than (X)HTML. With CSS you can set colors on text and in the background of any element; you can create borders around any element; you can use it to change the way text is capitalized, its spacing and more, much more effects.

Another big advantage is that it can help keep your document size as small as possible with speedy download times as a result. How is that possible you will ask. Well, using CSS in an external sheet that is linked to your pages: the CSS rules are written in the external file and that file is linked to your pages. The web browser will search for the file, load it and use whatever rules it contains to render the HTML document.

Ah, you say, but it has still to load the external file, so how would that speed up my download time? Because most pages use a lot of FONT tags and tables to achieve nifty visual effects but this creates a lot of HTML markup and that, in return, creates a big file size. But with CSS you can achieve the same (and better) effects with far more compact code so the file size get's smaller. Besides, once the sheet is downloaded, it remains in the users' browser cache thus reducing the download time.

Using an external sheet has also the advantage that making changes site wide will take just seconds. Assume you have set all your H1 elements to be blue but some day you need them to be red. You have about 200 of them site wide. Well, with CSS you change the value blue to red and it applies immediately to all your H1 elements !

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Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material of whatever nature, such as content, code & images, created by Dzinelabs and included in this site and any related pages, including the weblog's archives, © 2009 Dzinelabs. All Rights reserved.

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About the author

Emigrated from Belgium to Brazil and banging his head on the table with Css frustration.

Living in the state Minas Gerais in Brazil. Originally, i'm from Belgium but emigrated to Brazil in 2007.

I'm a freelance web developer and became active with HTML and CSS in 2003.