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The Man From Hollywood

The Man From Hollywood

A kinetic type experiment, showing what you can do with simple CSS (no Flash, no images, no Java, minimal Javascript).

You will need a WebKit browser to see it (Safari or Google Chome.)

This is amazing. Goodbye Flash, and good riddance.

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Photoshop is completely irrelevant when it comes to proper web development. Your tools are HTML & CSS, not some over-priced, crappy piece of Adobe software.

Design is how well thought-out something is, not how many layers in your PSD you have. Armed with nothing but free software, even on the most basic computer, you can single-handily invent the next greatest website, rivalling the biggest corporations with highly paid developers.

Never forget that—with just Notepad, you can take on the world.

Kroc Camen of Camen Design (his new site is coming soon, and is beautiful – on the outside and inside!)
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CSScaffold

CSScaffold

Scaffold is a new type of CSS framework, built with PHP, that allows speed up your development time by doing the hard work for you. It is different to other CSS frameworks, like Blueprint and 960.gs, but it’s power lies in it’s ability to extend the CSS language. You can even generate the CSS found in other CSS frameworks dynamically, like grid classes to quickly build layouts.

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No, no, no! You’re doing it wrong!

You may want orange text, and that may be a lovely orange, but this is completely the wrong way to go about doing it. The whole point of CSS is that it should be a separate layer of styling which is added to your website, and can be interchangeable. You should be able to change the colour of that orange text some day.

To use a class name such as ‘orangetext’ you are completely missing the point. When it comes to changing that orange to perhaps a blue or green, you are going to either:

  • Have something in your HTML called ‘orangetext’ that is blue, causing confusion to anyone else looking at your code (and to your future self, when you forget why you did this)
  • Or you have to go through your website replacing ‘orangetext’ with something else

Neither of these outcomes are desirable.

So what should I do?

  • Solution 1: Use class and id names that describe the content, not the presentation. Perhaps simply use the <em> tag, which implies an emphasis; or <strong>, which implies a strong emphasis
  • Solution 2: Use HTML5 and CSS3 to completely eradicate class names. It can be done (that website has no <divs>, no classes, no ids). This not only makes your code future-proof, but also beautiful.

I have not yet got to the point where I am building websites without classes (one major hurdle is Internet Explorer support, as usual) but at the very least you should make sure your class names are representative of the content and not the presentation. A couple of examples follow:

BAD: <span class='orangetext'>     GOOD: <em>
BAD: <p class='title'>     GOOD: <h1>