stressfree - css

CSS redesign saves ESPN 730TB a year

David — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 03:02:56 +0000

The cost of redesigning an old table/image based site around CSS can be outweighed by the bandwidth savings as associate art director for ESPN.com Mike Davidson points out:

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2003/06/espn-interview

In the interview he explains the logic behind the ESPN.com redesign and the massive bandwidth savings they were able to achieve (approximately 730TB a year). Given the actual saving per hit was only 50Kb the huge overall bandwidth illustrates the magnitude of the Web space. Designing high-bandwidth sites with lots of images, table-based design or even worse Flash is just asking for trouble in the long-term if the ultimate objective is to create a popular site. It is no good generating lots of advertising revenue from page views if this traffic ends up costing far more.

Very nice CSS replacement for the SELECT MULITPLE tag

David — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:17:25 +0000

The title pretty much explains everything. The SELECT form tag has a MULTIPLE option but in practice this turns very ugly very quickly. This little CSS hack provides the functionality of the tag without the user-interface nightmares.

Nice CSS Graphs

David — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 01:17:17 +0000

Simple CSS based graphs for web display. Far simplier than generating static images or using SVG.

A Great Site with a Funny Name

David — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 21:26:44 +0000

The name is hard to say ten times fast but the demos, scripts and discussion is undenyably fantastic. Extremely useful for leading edge web-based interface scripts and ideas.

http://script.aculo.us/

Great CSS/Javascript Image Resize Script

David — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 21:08:38 +0000

A blog post from AgilePartners describes how upcoming web applications like Fluxiom achieve the dynamic image resizing effects illustrated in their promotional material. It turns out to be very simple (Javascript modifies the CSS image size property) yet the effect is really cool. True 'image resizing' is not employed, large images are downloaded to the browser and then it is left up to the browser's own display engine to perform the dynamic resizing. In a high bandwidth environment this does not matter but for people stuck in 56k modem land it is just one more nail in the coffin for their enjoyable Internet experience. There is almost a need now for web developers to be able to distinguish between low and high bandwidth users in the same way browser or Javascript detection is employed.

Book Review: The Zen of CSS Design

David — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 22:18:21 +0000

After suffering from an artistic drought when laying out a web page I went out and purchased The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag. The book is very attractive and filled with colour images of web pages from numerous designers from around the world. It caught my eye when browsing the rows of web design books because it did not actually look like a computer book, in fact if you dropped the acronym CSS you would not even guess it was about technical web programming.

The subject of the book revolves around a single website: Zen Garden, a showcase for leading edge CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and web design. The unique thing about Zen Garden is that the designs use exactly the same HTML code, all the clever formatting is achieved through CSS1 & CSS2 applied intelligently and with a few clever hacks. Whilst I have known about CSS for years I had not fully appreciated its capabilities and potential for vastly improving web user interfaces until I read the Zen of CSS Design. All aspects of web design from colour to layout are covered with case studies from the Zen Garden website used to illustrate these ideas.

Unlike other HTML & CSS books the Zen of CSS Design does not start out at beginner level and work up to advanced techniques. Instead it assumes the reader understands the basic principles of web technologies and intermingles advanced CSS techniques in between theory. This is great for experienced people but may turn beginners off initially. I like this approach and also feel someone with no experience with HTML or CSS could still learn a great deal from the basic principles conveyed.

I have read many books and few have radically changed the way I think about all aspects of web design as much as this one. Not only is this a great book for visual inspiration it also is great for technical programmers seeking to create sleek code that is cross-browser compatible and easily portable to other platforms such as PDAs. I would recommend it to anyone interested in web design or looking for new techniques and principles to improve their existing websites.