Archive for May 2011

CSS Cards (Socially) Compared

28th May 2011

Since I wrote my CSS Playing Cards, I wondered how to best publish a comparison of all the various techniques of cards I found and how to keep it up-to-date.

Then I found the answer in a great new service that’s perfect for this kind of thing:
SocialCompare.com

It lets you easily create and edit comparison tables.
You can compare just about anything you can think of. Anyone (well, any registered user) can edit the tables (i.e. items and criteria) or knock something together out of already existing items. It’s more future-proof as it’s easier to update and less error-prone (if the community is there to help to maintain it). It is well thought out: You can re-arrange items and criteria to see more easily what’s important to you.

This takes the wiki concept to the next level.
If you love spreadsheets (like me), you’ll love SocialCompare.

Here is a preview of the Comparison of CSS Playing Cards I created:

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Basic is the new Reset

8th May 2011

I don’t like reset styles. (And I’m not the only one.) Instead I’m a fan of good basic styles.

Don’t get me wrong, reset styles serve their purpose. They are good for beginners and many intermediates and can save them a lot of trouble. It’s better to use reset styles if you’re not sure why basic styles might be better than not to use any of those two concepts.
Reset and basic styles alike should serve as a reminder to overwrite browser presets.

I don’t see the reason why you might declare, say, the first headline to have no margin (h1 {margin: 0;}), only to redeclare it to have a bottom margin (h1 {margin-bottom: 1em;}) a few lines later.
Basic styles should set all styles instead of resetting them. In order to make reset styles unnecessary, you only need to make sure to style every element and their necessary properties which browser default styles might add. And declare everything else that makes sense in your case.

So, ideally you should set and reset what you need at the same time. That’s what I’m doing with my basic styles.

Most of these styles are quite universal. I tried to keep them as generic as possible (e.g. with many shades of grey). But they are not meant to be taken without adjusting them to each project. You most likely want to change everything I marked with “§font”, “§fsize” and “§colour”.

They are already part of my DokuWiki Starter template and are will therefore be part of the new (soon to come) DokuWiki default template. I will provide an always up-to-date version apart from the following current version (2011-05-08): I will maintain them as basic.css on GitHub.

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