AdvancED CSS

Gain a solid foundation in developing and testing device-friendly websites using the power of CSS.
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This practice has come to be known as "resetting" styles.


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Note the universal selector. This effectively does away with all margin, padding and border for every element including the body, headings, lists, and list items. It then becomes the designers responsibility freedom?


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Resets can get much more sophisticated. The simple reset we have shown above gives us a blank slate on which to lay out our page. Now we have to make some decisions:. We address these questions in the sections below by looking at specific layouts. For all layouts, we'll assume we want a header and a footer. Pages designed to use the full width of the browser window are often described as having a "fluid" or "liquid" layout.

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That's because one or more of the columns must be automatically resized according to the size of the browser window. We'll start with the simple two-column layout shown below: The four content areas have the following ids: Note that we use HTML5 semantic tags here: The page content is contained in a wrapper div with id wrapper , which we can use to put a border around the content. Later we'll see how we can use it to adjust the width of the whole content. The wrapper div is divided into three "rows": The main row is broken up into two "columns": It also has a "clearer" div , which we'll discuss shortly.

Let's see how we would add a third column with the right and left columns fixed and the center column fluid: In this exercise, you will position the heading elements within the columns, so the page looks like this: You'll only need to change the CSS. When you set margin to auto it makes the left and right margins equal.

You might have tried setting each margin to 7. Theoretically, that should work, and it does in Firefox and Safari, but it can be buggy in some older browser versions. Changing our fluid layouts to fixed layouts is easy. In fact, the challenge to the last exercise gets us most of the way there. Instead of setting the width to a percentage value, we set it to a fixed-width value in pixels and we set margin to auto:.

The screenshots below show the results: When designing, we recommend the following general principles with regards to positioning choices:. There are many other ways to create multi-column layouts, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. We feel that the method we've laid out here is a good choice; however, it does have its disadvantages:. The good news is that the other methodologies use the same basic CSS properties you have learned to use here.

So if you decide that you can't deal with either of the two compromises we've made above, you should be able to pick up the other methodologies relatively easily. One that we recommend is known as the Holy Grail. This methodology uses less meaningless markup i. However, it makes other compromises:. Creating well-designed pages is more art than science.

From layout to life

Somebody has to come up with the design. You don't have to be a designer to be a CSS master. You just have to be able to turn a designer's design into a web page. In this exercise, you will learn how much you know.

Resetting Styles

Most of the CSS is done, but you'll have to review it and compare it to the HTML to get an understanding of the different design elements. The design you're shooting for is shown below: The design used in this exercise was provided courtesy of RamblingSoul. CSS3 introduced tools for formatting text into multiple columns, much like one might see in a print newspaper.

While not page layout per se that is, we don't use it to position the header, navigation, and footer elements , the CSS3 "Multiple-column Layout Module" offers an easy way to organize text content into columns.

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We can control the size and number of columns, the gap between columns, and an optional rule between columns. Listed below are the relevant properties:. At its simplest, we can use the shorthand columns property to specify the width and number of columns:. The code above would style any element of class columns to flow text into three columns because the second parameter has value 3 of equal width because the first parameter has value auto.

We can use any of the specific properties to exercise more control over the layout - to add a rule, say, between the columns or to add a gap between the columns. We use a two-column fixed layout that is, with the navigation on the left and the main content on the right and we display the text in the large main column in two columns:. Inside the article with id content , we add a div with class columns , wrapping a series of paragraphs with text content.

In the CSS file, we style this new div so it has two equal-width columns columns: The CSS3 flexible box model or "flexbox", as it's commonly known offers a handy way to control the horizontal and vertical arrangement of elements on a page. As the W3C description states:. In the flex layout model, the children of a flex container can be laid out in any direction, and can "flex" their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent.

Both horizontal and vertical alignment of the children can be easily manipulated. Nesting of these boxes horizontal inside vertical, or vertical inside horizontal can be used to build layouts in two dimensions. The flexbox layout mode is designed to address the shortcomings of these layout modes - the modes we've used for years to layout our pages - and to better address the challenges of modern web design - a way to present content visually that doesn't force us to exploit these other layout modes in ways for which they weren't originally conceived.

CSS's block layout is inherently designed for vertical organization of elements; inline is designed for horizontal layout. At the time of this writing, there is considerable and justified confusion about the "correct" CSS values for flexible box-model layouts. The use of vendor prefixes is recommended and very much needed ; support among browsers varies considerably. While the flexbox layout is becoming better and better supported by browsers, if you expect users with older browsers even not-too-old browsers as a significant percentage of your traffic, then using flex layout might not be a good idea.

Chris Coyer's excellent article "Old" Flexbox and "New Flexbox" details the evolution of the flexbox standard and browser support thereof: We will use the newer display: But keep in mind that it is poorly supported as of now; Chrome is your best bet for the demos and exercises below. Flexbox layout is perhaps best demonstrated through a set of examples. Please note that, throughout our discussion here, for brevity, we will refer to the unprefixed syntax for the various properties; the example code includes the -webkit- prefix.

At the top of our CSS, we give each "item" box some padding, set its text color to white, align its text in the center, and add some rounding to its corners. We use nth-child to set the color for the first, second, and third element of each example. The flex-flow property is shorthand for flex-direction the first value and flex-wrap the second value. Valid values for flex-direction are:.


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We'll experiment with other values in a bit. The flex-wrap property defines whether children are forced into a single line vertical or horizontal, depending on the flex-direction value. This second example specifies a row-based flex layout, just like the first example. But now we add justify-content, which defines how flex items align along the main axis of the flex container.

In the absence of any individual flex items specifying how they take up space relative to their sibling flex items which we'll see below , justify-content defines how unused space in the container will be allocated. Here's the list of possible values:. In the first example, in the absence of an explicit statement, box1 had a default justify-content value of flex-start, meaning the elements were packed into the start left end of the container.

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In "Example 2," we set justify-content to space-between: Try resizing the browser wider and narrower to see this change. In "Example 3," we set flex-direction the first value of flex-flow to column-reverse; we also give a set height and width and pixels, respectively to the container box3. The result is that the three elements show in reverse order, with "item3" first and "item1" last.

We also set justify-content: This has the result of packing the elements at the bottom of the container: We now see the effect of flex-wrap: The screenshots below show "Example 4" in very narrow, less narrow, and wide browser widths:.

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When the browser narrows, however, the three contained elements in "Example 5" shrink in width, a result of the fact that we set box5 to not wrap: Values for order can be any positive or negative integer; the default is 0. Ordering is relative to the direction specified for the flow: The order property has no effect on elements that are not flex items.

Last, in "Example 7" and "Example 8," we demonstrate the use of the flex property on the contained elements. The flex property is a shorthand for setting flex-grow the first value , flex-shrink the second value , and flex-basis the third value. In "Example 7," we set flex-grow to 8, 2, and 4 for each of the three contained elements, respectively. The flex-basis value determines whether to allocate each flex element's width or height in the contained space absolutely or after determining each contained element's inherent width or height.

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A value of 0 means "allocate space absolutely"; as in "Example 7", we ignore how big or small each flex item is per its content, padding, etc. In "Example 8," we set each flex item to have a flex-basis value of auto. This means that the browser will first give each flex item its own inherent width, then allocate the remaining space from the container around each element proportionally, per their flex-grow values. See the W3C specification for more information.

Try changing the width of the browser to see the difference between "Example 7" and "Example 8". In this exercise, you will style a typical blog listing page, using flexible box layout to position and order elements. Navigation bars or menus present a list of choices to the visitor. For example, under About, you might find: Background images can be used to create effects not available in standard CSS or yet supported by browsers. They can also be used to combine images into a single file to save on download time.

Some of the graphics used in this lesson were contributed by RamblingSoul. HTML Forms are often laid out with two-column tables with the label in the left column and the form field in the right. One could argue that there is nothing semantically wrong with this as the labels are really like headers for the values in the form controls. However, that argument falls apart when table cells are joined with colspan to fit wider form controls such as textareas. Even if you were to carefully layout the form so that the label were in the left column and the form field in the right, the table is not needed.

The label tag serves the purpose of providing a "heading" for the form field. In this lesson, we'll learn how to layout forms without tables using CSS. In this lesson, we layout practices that we recommend that you consider. We feel more strongly about some than others.