John Cox

Blogs · @wyome · Now · Shelf

Tagged css3 · everything

Interesting

www.balkhis.com

55+ Extremely Useful Online Generators for Designers

This post curates a comprehensive directory of over 50 free online generator tools organized by category—including background, favicon, color, CSS, form, and text generators—designed to help web designers automate repetitive tasks and save time during the design process. The author hand-picked each tool and grouped them for easy browsing, emphasizing that these generators produce quality results while dramatically reducing design workload. The post invites readers to contribute additional generator tools they've found useful to expand the collective resource.

Permalink productivitydesigntoolscss3

Web Designer Wall

Best of CSS Design 2007

The author compiled fifty websites selected from Best Web Gallery, a CSS and Flash design gallery he founded in 2006, representing what he considered the best web designs of 2007. Each entry includes a brief annotation highlighting distinctive design elements—typography, color use, layout innovation, or artistic effects—that made the site noteworthy. The list serves as a snapshot of web design trends from that period, ranging from minimalist portfolios to richly illustrated commercial sites, demonstrating the variety of successful approaches to web design at the time.

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CSS-Tricks

Tips For Creating Great Web Forms - CSS-Tricks

This piece outlines best practices for building accessible and functional web forms, covering semantic HTML (using proper label tags), CSS styling techniques (like floating labels for table-like layouts), and JavaScript enhancements (such as clearing placeholder text on focus). It also recommends considering existing form-building tools like Wufoo or Web Form Factory rather than building forms from scratch, while warning against common pitfalls like CSS resets that can break default button styling across browsers.

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MONC

Disabling Deprecated HTML Using CSS | David’s kitchen

Den här guiden förklarar de ofta förbisedda nyanserna i HTML-attribut bortom de vanligaste som class och id — bland annat hur booleska attribut som `disabled` bara aktiveras genom sin närvaro (inte sitt värde), varför `disabled="false"` faktiskt fortfarande inaktiverar ett fält, och hur ARIA-attribut kompletterar HTML för tillgänglighet. Texten täcker också moderna prestandaattribut som `loading="lazy"`, `async`/`defer` för scripttaggar och det relativt nya `fetchpriority="high"` för att påverka Core Web Vitals, samt hur `data-*`-attribut låter dig lagra data direkt på element för JavaScript-läsning utan att skriva inline-logik. Guiden avslutar med varningar om deprecated attribut som `align` och `bgcolor` som hör hemma i CSS istället.

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Smashing Magazine

11 Almost Perfect Business Layouts | Smashing Magazine

Susy is a Sass-based grid framework that lets designers create custom, responsive layouts purely through CSS and Sass mixins without adding classes to HTML markup. The article demonstrates how to use Susy's core features—the `span` mixin for sizing columns, the `gutter` function for consistent spacing, the `gallery` mixin for multi-column layouts, and the `layout` mixin for switching between grid configurations at different breakpoints. Unlike heavier frameworks like Bootstrap, Susy performs the mathematical calculations for column widths and gutters while leaving all styling decisions to the designer, making it lightweight and flexible for responsive web design.

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www.stripegenerator.com

Stripe Generator - diagonal stripes background tiles

I can't write a summary of this piece because it isn't an article or piece of reportage — it's a web application interface for a stripe pattern generator tool. There's no argument being made or information being reported, just instructions on how to use the tool to create and download striped textures for CSS or Photoshop. If you meant to save an actual article or essay, please share that instead.

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Moz

SEOmoz | 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should)

This post catalogs 15 underused CSS Level 2 properties with examples and explanations of their purposes, ranging from visual effects like `clip` and `text-shadow` to print-specific controls like `page-break-before` and typography refinements like `font-stretch`. The author notes that browser support varies across these properties and recommends testing before implementation, while flagging certain uses (like generating content with CSS) as conceptually problematic despite being technically possible.

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Smashing Magazine

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without | Smashing Magazine

A curated list of 53 essential CSS techniques and articles covering modern web design practices, ranging from foundational concepts like CSS selectors and layouts to advanced topics such as CSS3 animations, flexbox, grid systems, and responsive design. The collection emphasizes how CSS enables separation of design from content, making websites easier to maintain and update while advocating for accessible, usable, and well-structured code over outdated table-based layouts.

Permalink designtipstutorialcss3

Smashing Magazine

50 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs in 2006 | Smashing Magazine

Smashing Book #5 is a 584-page hardcover guide offering practical front-end techniques and design patterns from experienced web professionals tackling real responsive design projects. The 13 chapters cover essential topics including responsive workflows, SVG mastery, Flexbox layouts, web fonts, responsive images, email design, testing and debugging, performance optimization, and strategies for maintaining creativity within systematic design processes. Rather than chasing trends, the book focuses on battle-tested methods that solve actual problems in responsive web design, from complex components like tables and navigation to offline functionality and client collaboration workflows.

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lesliefranke.com

CSS Cheat Sheet

This is a CSS reference guide covering the syntax and properties for styling web pages across eight categories: general display properties, fonts, text formatting, the box model, borders, positioning, backgrounds, and lists. It includes the correct order for shorthand notation and explains key values for common properties like display, position, float, and text-align. The guide distinguishes between external style sheets, internal styles, and inline styles as methods for applying CSS to HTML elements.

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Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine | Blog Archive » CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions

Smashing Book #5 is a 584-page hardcover guide featuring practical front-end techniques and design patterns for responsive web design, drawing from real-world projects rather than short-lived trends. The book covers 13 chapters addressing responsive workflow, SVG, Flexbox, web fonts, responsive images, email design, testing, performance optimization, and offline functionality, written by respected designers and developers like Sara Soueidan, Zoe Gillenwater, and Yoav Weiss. It emphasizes scalable design systems, pragmatic solutions to complex responsive challenges, and balancing creative design with predictable processes to build memorable, maintainable websites.

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www.webdevout.net

CSS Hacks

This article documents CSS hacks and filters—exploits of browser bugs and inconsistencies—that target specific browser versions, primarily Internet Explorer 6 and 7, with varying levels of reliability and validity. It categorizes recommended techniques like selector-based hacks (`* html {}`, `*:first-child+html {}`), attribute selector quirks, and the `!important` identifier abuse, alongside unrecommended methods using invalid CSS prefixes (`_property`, `*property`) and malformed pseudo-classes. The article emphasizes that while hacks should be avoided when possible, understanding these options allows developers to weigh consequences and choose the least harmful workarounds for cross-browser layout challenges.

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www.cssplay.co.uk

Stu Nicholls | CSSplay | CSS only menus

This page catalogs dozens of CSS-based navigation menu implementations spanning from 2014 to 2026, ranging from simple dropdowns to complex tree menus using various CSS techniques like :focus-within, :has(), details/summary elements, and the newer popover API. The author notes that older implementations from 2005 have been removed as outdated, and while the menus work in current browsers, compatibility varies across older versions and different platforms, with some Mac-specific issues reported.

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webdesign.maratz.com

Super Stripes

This piece describes a practical web design technique for creating reusable stripe patterns using small transparent GIF images layered over different background colors in CSS. By preparing a few basic GIF files with alternating transparent and solid pixels, designers can quickly generate varied striped backgrounds across a website by simply changing the background-color property rather than creating new images for each color variation. The author suggests using this approach to visually distinguish different sections of a website while maintaining a cohesive design theme.

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A List Apart

A List Apart: Articles: CSS Design: Going to Print

Eric Meyer explains how to create effective print style sheets using CSS instead of maintaining separate printer-friendly versions of web documents. He walks through the specific CSS fixes applied to A List Apart, including working around a Gecko browser bug with floated elements, adjusting backgrounds and font sizes for print, styling hyperlinks to display their URLs, and extending the masthead design across the page width. The approach eliminates version skew between web and print versions while requiring only a single well-structured HTML document and media-specific CSS rules.

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www.khmerang.com

Khmerang.com - CSS-Technique: Worn Type

This tutorial explains a CSS technique for creating a worn, distressed text effect in headers by overlaying a semi-transparent pattern image on top of text using an absolutely positioned span element. The method relies on floating the header to contain its width to the text itself, setting overflow to hidden to clip the pattern image, and creating a random-pixel GIF with transparency that obscures portions of the underlying text. While the technique effectively produces the visual effect and can be applied to various pattern types, it has the limitation that text cannot be selected normally due to the image overlay blocking mouse events.

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