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Edit: Resolved. Rather than resetting the Zoom to 100%, the "View < Actual Size" resolved the issue.
I've been having an issue with Chrome rendering divs as fractions and not exactly as the specified numbers.
For example:
HTML
<div class='tile'>foo</div>
CSS
.tile {
background-color: #CCCCCC;
border-width: 2px;
border-style: outset;
display: table;
float: left;
}
Rather than being rendered as 2px, the border-width is "1.8181817531585693px" inferred both from the Chrome Developer Tools > Elements > Computed and using the debugger with jQuery .css function.
A few additional things to note is that this only happens when it's loaded on an FTP, not locally. This issue also doesn't occur in either Firefox or Safari. Any ideas or explanation as to what exactly Chrome is doing, or the solution to it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
The short answer is they are dealing with real numbers that are binary internally, and things must be done quickly.
So some numerical corners are probably being cut, that are normally not noticeable to the average web page viewer, that is if a page is designed so that it is not noticeable.
Go figure, I know, you would think that browsers would be more accurate, but I have found that even with the most careful and detailed control of my css, there seem to be rounding errors that play havoc with small details when displayed.
First, I would suggest you use em rather than px. I know you might have to start over with your css, but I have found it to be more reliable, screen to screen. Remember modern pages are not based on pixels. They are dynamic beasts that can be zoomed in and out, and squished narrower and still must output something reasonable.
Also I would suggest rethinking how you are laying out your page so such small details are not an issue. In carpentry the skilled artisan knows how to hide the rough edges with a molding.
I have a very accurate web page I use to generate to a special printed flyer. It was a royal pain to force html and css into something they didn't want to do, which was be accurate.
Also I can test my production site on the 5 major browsers, right on top of each other so I can see little differences when I switch between them, from one browser to another. They are all off just a little from each other in various ways, and really there is no way to make them accurate.
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Once apon a time IE6 lacked support for CSS features such as "display: table-cell" and inline-block, resulting in "float" being hijacked and used for layout - which is was never designed for (or particularly good at).
Using floats seems to result in overly fragile layouts that are difficult to maintain and often break completely with changing dynamic content.
This was a necessary evil in its day, however now that support for browsers pre-IE8 are less of a concern, we should in theory be able to move away from floats and use the parts of CSS that actually work well for layouts - such as the aforementioned display: table-cell and inline-block.
I'm currently considering of recommending my team move away from float based designs entirely - am I at risk of painting myself into a corner and having problems down the line , or is this a better option if older browser support is not important on our project?
Should you move away from floats entirely?
Sure, so long as you don't need the deeper browser support. When it comes down to it, what really matters is whether the page displays properly for the largest numbers of visitors to your site as possible, right?
Another issue that should be of concern to you is maintainability, but I can't say that it'd be accurate to say that either method is less maintainable than the other in every situation. So I'd just ask yourself what layout method your team is more familiar with and how far back you need to support.
display: table-cell is supported in IE8+. Float displays can go all the way back to IE6.
Other thoughts & the future...
Contrary to what you said about floats, I think when used right they can be very predictable. My primary qualm with them is the need to clear the parent which is a bit awkward. Further, popular scaffolding systems like Bootstrap and 960-Grid still choose to use floats, and for good reason: they're useful, have great cross-browser support, and can do what you need to do.
With that said, the future is looking good for Css and layouts. There are two upcoming models of layout in Css: the grid system and the flexbox model. Neither are recommendations yet, so browser support is a bit shaky on them.
The grid system is similar to display: table-cell but gives you much greater control. Flexbox tries to generalize and abstract the idea of displaying elements, which allows for really powerful, fluid (or 'flexible') layouts. Both of these will be pretty amazing once they're implemented in browsers.
If you want to read more on usage of flexbox, I recommend the excellent MDN article about it
Were I you, I'd just hold out and use floats – in particular, by using a scaffolding framework. I haven't worried about writing scaffolding Css in a long, long time; I use frameworks since the code is already written for me. And, for me, I'd only find it worthwhile to completely restructure a project once flexbox and the grid system are a recommendation and more widely implemented.
Like you said is about what is best for your team, but believe me... if you use float correct and in the right places you don't get a layout breaking because you change the div content.
But in the future the best way will be using flexbox, you can accomplish everything about blocks horizontal, vertical, with same sizes, diferrent sizes... Anyway when all browsers support it, will be aewsome.
Is it possible to create the following without use of images, just using css3?
Yep. The relevant things you'll want to look up are gradients, text-shadow, and 2D transforms.
You'll need to do better with accepting answers to questions you've asked, and ask questions that show you've tried it yourself before you'll get better answers, most likely. People aren't going to give you the code if you've shown no effort to try to do it yourself.
Yes, it's possible.
CSS border-radius, gradients, text-shadow and #font-face will get you quite a bit of the way.
Those angled tabs are going to be a massive pain to get right, and likely to have cross-browser issues. You'll probably be able to get them right using CSS transform, but it'll require separate DOM elements for the edges, otherwise you'll transform your text as well.
The outward curves at the bottom of the tabs will also be tricky. I can't see an easy way to achieve that.
Assuming your aim is to do it without images, rather than simply as a CSS excersise, then a better solution might be to do it using SVG. You can incorporate SVG as elements within your page, so no separate downloads, and it should be fairly straightforward to achieve the results you want -- certainly much easier than with pure CSS.
SVG won't work in older versions of IE (IE8 and below), but since you're asking about CSS3, I assume that's not an issue for you. If it is an issue, then you can use a library like Raphael or SVG2VML to convert the SVG into VML on the fly for IE.
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Is CSS text-transform expensive in terms of processing? It appears to me that the browser's being forced to do some work that it wouldn't normally need to (if you didn't transform), but is that a significant amount of processing? Does it impact performance at all?
It might take a bit more processing from the client's browser, but this will be totally insignificant unless you're transforming pages and pages of text (and if you're doing that, you're doing something wrong).
You also have the overhead of having the CSS property written in your stylesheet (heavier file), but once again it's only a few characters and shouldn't make any difference.
I got curious so I ran some basic benchmarks. On Firefox 3 I displayed a page with 200 paragraphs of Lorem Lipsum.
Rendering it will take between 0.150s to 0.175s
When adding text-transform:none I don't see any significant difference.
When adding text-transform:uppercase it now takes between 0.350s and 0.380s
When adding text-transform:capitalize it now takes between 0.320s and 0.350s
When adding text-transform:lowercase it now takes between 0.320s and 0.350s
So apparently we do have some overheads processing this, but once again I'm capitalizing hundreds of lines and it only costs 0.2s. Therefore if I were you I'd use it without thinking about performance too much unless you want to text-transform huge chunks of text.
If you're designing for mobile, every little bit helps. If it's not dynamic, then type it out in uppercase
I don't see any reason why it should be any more 'expensive' than any other CSS style. All it does is convert a string to upper/lower case, which is hardly the most taxing process a computer can be asked to do.
I'd compare it with displaying in italics or bold; both these styles effectively change the font for the entire string, but you wouldn't consider not using them in case it's processor intensive for the browser, would you?
The only time you could even conceivably think of text-transform as having a hard time would be if you're using a non-latin character set, in which case converting to upper/lower case may not make sense. But you can be pretty sure the brower makers have got that covered. (and in any case, if you're in that position, why would you even want to use text-transform?)
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I am a programmer doing web development for over two years now. Even though I’ve been doing front end engineering for the past two years I don’t think I have done it the right way
For instance:
I still do layout with tables and not with just CSS. I haven’t still found out a way to correctly present data aligned and tabular.
I don’t know the difference between display: none and visibility: hidden (well, I know it now. but there are many cases like- padding, margins, overflows etc)
I haven’t really followed the inheritance way to writing CSS. Almost every style starts with a # and not a class.
Whenever a page loads slowly the html elements are out of place and fall into order only when it’s completely loaded.
I don’t know what this picture in firebug is conveying (by the way, firebug is my savior. Life would have been impossible without Firebug)
Whenever layout’s in a mess I am tempted to use position:absolute. Invariably it ends up in a bigger mess.
I know I am doing a lot of things wrong(and I need to get it right) here but I manage to get things into place and somehow show it up, only to see it messed up in a different browser.
I don’t want do a primer on CSS or CSS for dummies. I know more than that. I want to learn CSS the right way. Focusing on problems like the examples I showed above and rectifying them.
Can you point me to resources or add common suggestions and tips used by CSS developers to get it right.
Check out Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.
Here are some general rules to live by:
Tables are good for tabular data. If the data you're presenting belongs in a table, don't go out of your way trying to make a grid out of <div>s. Doesn't make sense.
As far as layout is concerned, use <div> tags, stay away from tables. Get to know the float property well. With CSS3, there are going to be new, improve standards to the display property. Learn them.
display: none completely removes the element from the viewport. Conversely, visibility: hidden retains the whitespace that the element would have otherwise taken up. In both cases, the element remains in the DOM.
General rule of classes and IDs. Page elements and IDs should have a one-to-one relationship per page. For example, #Column1, #Column2, #Footer, #Header. Page elements and classes, on the other hand, should be a many-to-one relationship, like: .container or .navLink. Use classes when you know you're going to be using a particular element quite a bit.
Think in terms of efficiency. The less style rules you have, the more quickly your page will load and the easier style issues will be to debug.
I have about a million other things to say but that should get you started.
For layout-driven CSS, be sure to check out Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong. It's a bit cutting edge, since IE 7 doesn't support display: table (pity, I know), but it does cover traditional layout CSS techniques like floating and absolute positioning, and provides a good transition from table-based layouts to CSS ones. I highly recommend it.
I don't know if you're building off of any dynamic language or if you're just coding raw HTML, but you should also look at using SASS in your projects, as I think it helps force you to pay more attention to inheritance. Otherwise, reviewing more "rudimentary" tutorials (like CSS for Dummies) might actually be helpful, as they go over a lot of CSS's fundamental principals in detail.
Lastly, CSS works best when you have semantically correct (x)html underneath the hood. In my opinion, it's easiest to see and learn "good" CSS when you have great, semantically correct html underneath. Here's a good overview of when to use what tags. Generally, I find it best to write my content with no regard what-so-ever to how it will look later, then use CSS later to make it gorgeous.
As always, you can pick up lots of neat tips and tricks at CSS Tricks, which have always helped me learn more about the correct usage of the language (like when I learned about overflow: auto for contained floating elements! Genius!).
Hope that helps!
Visit CSS Zen Garden to see what you can do only with CSS.
Visit W3 schools and follow the tutorial. It might seem simple for you, but you will learn the basic stuff.
Visit some sites, such as A list Apart to see how to do things and learn tricks.
See if a CSS framework suits your needs (such as 960 Grid).
I'm assuming you've installed Firebug?
Also, http://www.doctype.com might get more relevant results.
Practice, practice, practice. You know what you don't know, and that is the key to success in my mind. Every project you do, try to improve your skills, and eventually it will become second nature to do it the right way.
Eric Meyer's Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference is a great resource to understand exactly how selectors and rules work, and serves as a great reference as well.
Some thoughts on what you posted.
A Master Reset style sheet will
help with browser differences.
And Tabular data should use tables.
It's layouts that should avoid table
tags in favor of css.
Plenty of people here give good advices. I'll just add two more:
First, try to write valid (X)HTML. You can easily test your HTML code using W3C's HTML validator. Focus mainly on content, not on style.
Second, try to write valid CSS, preferably in a separate .css file. Avoid using the style attribute. (This part can be hard, if you want to support certain old browsers from Redmond). You can test your CSS using W3C's CSS validator.
Read CSS: The Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer. He explains why CSS was created, how it works (according to the standards), and will give you the background to understand the finer points. It also makes a good reference.
Experiment in Firebug
I don’t know what this picture in
firebug is conveying
Firebug itself can help you there. Do this:
Create a div with some text in it.
Use CSS to give it padding: 5px; margin: 5px; border: 1px solid black;
Examine it in Firebug, as you show in your question.
Click on any one of those numbers in the box model it's showing you, and start pressing the up and down arrows (or type a different number).
See how it changes in real time? This is one of the best things about Firebug: it lets you tweak without reloading, then modify your stylesheet when it looks right.
Keep doing this until you understand how padding, margins, and border work.
I think you should use, for your layout needs, one of the so called "css frameworks" (960.gs for example).
They are fast and reliable enough to build cross-browser layouts and also easy to read and understand as well, so you can learn all the good practices while you are coding.
CSS are easy and aren't a real programming language: don't be afraid of the word "framework" ;)
You could start by reading some good books on the matter. The ones of Eric Meyer are hands on and of very high quality. The other book that of which I learned a lot was the Zen of CSS design book.
And the rest is effort and practice. Be sure that you understand why something works the way it does, don't be satisfied with 'trial-and-error' css development.
http://www.amazon.com/Zen-CSS-Design-Visual-Enlightenment/dp/0321303474/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255629419&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/More-Eric-Meyer-Voices-Matter/dp/0735714258/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255629449&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Eric-Meyer-CSS-Mastering-Language/dp/073571245X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255629462&sr=8-1
Well, I will address some of these issues as best I can.
The difference between display:none and visibility:hidden is when the display is set the space for that item is not reserved. So imagine it as when the display is set the item is 'gone' off the page. Whereas if you are using the visibility option, the elements are on the page, in their place just invisible. Did I explain that clearly? Hopefully, that makes sense for you.
As far as the padding, border and margins, this is all referred to as the CSS Box Model. The information is contained as the element, its padding, border, then its margins. So padding is the distance between the element's content and its border whereas the margin is the distance between the border and the neighboring element. Again, I hope this helps clear this up for you a little bit.
Transitioning to CSS is sometimes tricky but well worth it.
Well the basics are quite simple, you should really get a hang of the quite easy if you've already don't some css coding.
The best practices, browser quirks, hacks and other sketchy stuff concerning crossbrowser layout is something else.
Here is my suggested reading list, all of them are on my bookshelf and certainly worth reading! If you ask me i'd say these are the book you should have read if you are a webdesigner.
Designing with webstandards
CSS Mastery
Bulletproof webdesign
for me, Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns by Michael Bowers changed it all. no more endless trial-and-error, but problem - pattern - solution. indispensable.
Whenever a page loads slowly the html elements are out of place and fall into order only when it’s completely loaded.
Are you putting your stylesheets at the top, in the <head> section?
Are you declaring explicit sizes for images, or does the browser have to guess, then rearrange things when the image shows up?
Depending on your learning style, I might recommend going straight to the source: the definition of CSS. You can find each of the various specs here: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/. While the specification doesn't really cover specific browser quirks (if it did, they wouldn't be quirks, would they?), it does a really good job (for me) of explaining how each piece works.
I will tell you my secret: follow this two classic tutorials
Listutorial
Floatutorial
And you'll know 80% of what you need to know about CSS.
30 Websites to follow if you’re into Web Development
http://htmldog.com/ is, in my opinion, one of the definitive resources to learning front-end web development the proper way.