Web Design: Teach yourself CSS the easy way

Teach yourself CSS the easy way

Written by Erich Bihlman

I taught myself HTML back in repparttar

mid-nineties and was proud of repparttar 137202

fact that I was able to accomplish repparttar 137203

design of fairly complex web pages with nothing more than a starter HTML book, an HTML reference book, and repparttar 137204

knowledge I had stored in my head. But back in those days, we web designers had what looking back was a fairly limited amount of tools with which to work, and repparttar 137205

quality (or lack thereof) of sites on repparttar 137206

web was lackluster at best.

Fast-forward to today: The hand-coder has more powerful and intuitive software packages available that will still allow us "to get our hands dirty", which brings us to repparttar 137207 purpose of this article. With repparttar 137208 standardization of repparttar 137209 much anticipated Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in repparttar 137210 late-nineties, repparttar 137211 web design community has become familiar with a much more powerful and precise method of web page layout.

"But how is an old-time web coder supposed to learn CSS repparttar 137212 easy way?!" Well, I say you should learn it repparttar 137213 way I, and countless others, have:

10 COMMANDMENTS OF WEBSITE ACCESSIBILITY

Written by Chris P. Bohn

We keep hearing about something called 'accessibility' for websites. So what is it all about huh?

Well, it is all about webmasters making sure that they give any disabled visitors who come to their site an equivalent experience to that which a non-disabled person would have. So, if your site has garish rainbow coloured text and is full of puerile nonsense, then you must inflict your garbage on disabled visitors (who probably have enough problems already) as well as repparttar rest of us.

How can you make sure your site is accessible? **********************************************

Accessibility is a legal requirement in repparttar 137185 UK and USA for government departments and anyone providing goods or services. Although personal homepages may be technically covered by accessibility laws (don't ask me, I'm not a lawyer) you probably would not be prosecuted for infringing repparttar 137186 rules on an ordinary personal home page. But if you are worried about accessibility, use one of repparttar 137187 free online validators. There are lots of them. The one most people know is Bobby (http://webxact.watchfire.com).

Rebels ******

Some people though, get far too obsessed with accessibility rules. The Web does need some rules. But people seem to forget that it also needs innovators, mavericks and rebels just as much. Otherwise repparttar 137188 Web and all of us who use it will probably all die of boredom.

But if you do need repparttar 137189 rules, here they are.

TEN COMMANDMENTS OF ACCESSIBILITY *********************************

1. Thou shalt worship Bobby and shall have no other accessibility checkers before him.

(And no 'marquee' tags either. They are so Internet Explorer! Some of us do use other browsers, you know.)

2. Thou shalt use 'alt' tags and/or 'title' tags in your images, because many people browse with images switched off. Also because some partially sighted or blind people use screen readers, which obviously cannot 'read' images.

3. Thou shalt not use 'alt' tags in each and every one of your 'spacer' gifs.

Although it would be technically correct to use 'alt' tags in spacer gifs, it would obviously be a nightmare if a disabled person (or anyone for that matter) had to listen to a screen reader reading out repparttar 137190 'alts' in all of these tags. And besides, those hundred plus spacer gifs are only there because you can't design properly to begin with. Yes I am bitchy aren't I?

4. Thou shalt use javascript only as a last resort because many people browse with javascript switched off.

If you do have to use javascript then remember to use a noscript tag and provide a way for someone without javascript to use your site.

Cont'd on page 2 ==>