HTML or CSS?

S1ocki, the key I think is to not try to actually understand it too much, it will just twist yr brain. If it works, it works, don't try to sort out *why* a certain span all of a sudden snapped into place.

Also, have you tried Mason yet? It's pretty much all I want to build sites in any more- it's dead easy to hack together simple pages, which is why I first tried it. But then when you need to build up a more complex site, the components and stuff come in really handy.

Mason? Does it support CSS better than Dreamweaver? I can't even use Dreamweaver anymore, which is a damn shame. CSS has forced me onto notepad.

Mason is an extension to perl- I write it in emacs, but you can use whatever editor you choose. Your apache (or whatever webserver you have) needs to be set up to execute the mason files- it's very similar to using CGI.pm. But better.

http://www.masonbook.com/ -you can read the book online.

Well, it was conceived as a design tool as well, back when they were the same thing. Since it doesn't understand CSS, it's useless for CSS designing. TopStyle is good, though a bit thin.

I do know a lot of people who use bbedit, also, and Boy is a big PHP user. He swears by PHPEdit, which is some text editor built specifically for PHP. I don't think he uses stylesheets, though, so who knows how it works with them.

I just keep messing with the html and css in TopStyle, then refreshing my localhost page to see what I've got. I do this despite the fact that TopStyle has a built-in browser window. It's about as easy, I guess.

There really is no good way to do it, is there? Someone somewhere is working on that. Inside a year or two, I'll be using a WYSIWYG css editor, I just know it. And there will be fields of buttercups and girls in white dresses and little baby deer in the sunshine. Ah, sweet halcyon days.

If anyone posts after me & tells you to check out vi, put your hands over your eyes and quickly skip over that post, for they are deeply misguided. =)

i think the world needs to move away from tightly designed webpages using nested tables and 1x1 invisible spacer images - html wasn't designed for that stuff and they ain't nothing but trouble.

vim >>> emacs 8)
(but, unless you've used either for many years, i'd stick with something a bit more gui-based)

For me, the most useful thing when developing with CSS is Mozilla's DOM Inspector.

(gvim also has a gui but, like the emacs gui, it just makes me think 'afterthought'. plus it requires taking your hands off the keyboard in order to use the mouse which is always going to be slower than ':w')

(( :w looks like an emoticon for something i don't understand))

I really have a hard time with css still and find that even the best-looking css sites look very "css". By that, I mean they all look alike, which tends to get boring, and I think this is due to annoying limitations and cross-browser issues.

Examples of nice-looking sites which look very boring after you've seen a few:
http://www.37signals.com
http://www.kicksology.net
http://www.netdiver.net

I think it's due to annoying limitations caused by cross-browser issues. I have often put together a page with a fun effect, only to find that IE doesn't render it properly, no matter how much I tweak margins or any of that other frustrating crap. Or I'll put together a page that works in IE and Firefox and Opera (and Safari), and then get to work to find that it's totally broken in IE5/Mac. When I'm at home, I'm thinking, "How many people really use IE5/Mac anymore?" When I'm at work, the answer is, "I do." It's so difficult and so unwise to ignore all the bad browsers from the past 5-10 years.

And if you're trying to make money off of doing this, doubly so. Once you design a site for a company, you immediately begin to realize how many terrible browsers are still out there. A lot. A whole lot. More than your designer friends' blogs would ever lead you to believe. Some days it seems like a majority. And every one of those people are seeing vertical menus that should be horizontal, or big gaps where there should be invisible seams, or a broken image where you arrogantly tried to put a png file, or something else or something else. There's really no end to the things that can go wrong.

I can only just keep learning new things, keep doing what I'm doing, knowing that it won't always be this way. Inside of the next few years, I *will* forget about IE5/Mac, and I will get some very restful sleep that night. I will also be much better at it by then, and I will be in higher professional demand. It hasn't happened yet, but the day will come when companies will come to CSS designers saying, "So, I hear you can cut my bandwidth in half..."

see, this is why i suggested forgetting the tightly designed, nested tables thing above. that zengarden site has the same text, same html even, displayed using a bunch of different css and the results are very diverse.

all those sites look fine to me, nice and clean. most of what people read on paper is black and white and very boringly laid out and nobody complains about that. see also the thread the other day with people saying what they liked about ILX design.

My blog. Let me know if you think it looks samey

(it probably does, to be honest)

Also, almost every single one fails in the cross-browser compatability test. I agree that they look great in supportive browsers, though.

(it probably does, to be honest)

Yes, the classic nested menu, boxiness, white space and all that, but it's very easy on the eyes. I like because it's minimalist and very easy to read. Nice!

care to supply details? i'm curious. i thought they'd tried to be as friendly as possible but i accept that it'll never work with non-css browsers (or borswers with bad css support)

that said, i don't do this stuff anymore, not for a living (and i'm a coder rather than a designer), so i'm behind the times. i do try and keep certain principles in my head for those times when i am html coding though.

in last job they decided that they'd put a little frontend onto the database tables to let people use that rather than hacking values with sql / toad. they wrote it in powerbuilder that only ran on windows and it turned out the university that was the customer didn't have a pc to run it on*. oops. next project they thought they'd avoid similar problems by writing it as a web-enabled frontend. they then preceded to write it in html so specific that it'd only run on the newest version of IE. meaning that everyone still had to use a pc to edit stuff. how i laughed.

i want to use images as links. i want these images not to have a border when i turn them into links.

i dont really understand css much, i just need the relevant info to paste into a txt editor

I FORGET THE CSS

img {
border: 0;
}

< a href="/" >src.jpg< /a>

or make an image class on your stylesheet:

< a href="/" >src.jpg< /a >

and the class would look like this:

.noborder {
border:0;
}

all i have is

type="text/css">A {TEXT-DECORATION: none}

img {
border: 0;
}

:( I've got a whole load of input cells mimicking a spreadsheet, and I've been requested to make the values go bold if they are changed, so it's easier for the user to see. Easy enough, I just change the class:

onchange="this.className='bulkeditchanged';"

BUT when the value goes bold for some reason it also makes the input box wider, so all the cells shift over a bit. How do I stop it doing this? It's not because the value is now too long to fit.

All I'm doing in the CSS class is setting font-weight: bold;

ARGH

make it change colour instead

Heh, I already do. They wanted it to change colour AND go bold.

I would guess 'cause default input size is dependent on character width, and bold characters are wider. Try setting the width in the bulkeditchanged class too.

inputs don't seem to have a width attribute (according to W3, anyway) - just a size, which is in number_of_chars, so presumably that won't work if the bold characters are wider (they don't seem to be wider, at least visibly, but I guess they must be)

they don't have a width attribute but you can still set it in css (just tried it and it worked, in firefox and ie).

You're a star! Thanks, it does work. This is why working with CSS/HTML is such a nightmare, there's no standards for anything :( I'm pretty new to this as you may have guessed.

The standards are fine! You shouldn't expect there to be a match-up between html attributes and css properties 'cause they're dealing with different things (content and presentation). The 'size' attribute is a tad confusing as it's a hangover from before css, when you did have to deal with the presentation in html.

Working with CSS is still a nightmare though, just for other reasons (poor standards support, often counter-intuitive or just damn weird).

The standard for CSS1 is a good reference, it's pretty easy to read:
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS1

Thanks, I've bookmarked that page.

I'm not a web developer, I'm a database developer who's been tasked with writing web frontends for some database tables, hence why I'm completely clueless about this stuff.

slightly ot and poss stupid question...

what are the main advantages of using php/sql to generate webpages? am i right in thinking that php is just the language that takes stuff out of the database and turns it into a webpage? is it easy to learn?

im only asking because i see lots of small websites using php and can't work out why.

am i right in thinking that php is just the language that takes stuff out of the database and turns it into a webpage?

Takes stuff out, puts stuff in, processes forms... anything that you can't do on the client with html/css/javascript.

I think it being free is the main advantage. But yes it is pretty easy to learn too.

PHP is fantastic but I wouldn't recommend using it for what are essentially static HTML pages. It's just unnecessary.

If you have a content mgmt type interface where non-developers are maintaining content, alright. Or perhaps changing HTML templates based on user action, okay. But don't put content into a database and then pull it out via PHP in order build a page just for the hell of it.

I'm tired of randomly trying floats and stuff to get things aligned right, so I figure I should get some proper training in CSS. Is there a hands-on book / online course that anyone can recommend? The last time I tried Code Academy I found it tediously basic.

Do you use Webmonkey?

http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/css-guide/

http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

fun article, won't change anything.

this one's similarly worthwhile:
http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

i agree with you on both respects.
also i avidly await the commercial ad space bubble explosion and/or AI singularity apocalypse