Rodent Regatta

Jennifer at ETC links to a quick CSS tutorial on styling buttons with CSS.

It’s early on Saturday morning. I’m going to work through some tutorials on XHTML, CSS and some fundamental web design techniques. We’ll see how far we get by Monday morning.

If you’re looking for things to study, take a look at Week 2 of the HTML & XHTML tutorial at Westciv. You can also dig into CSS Level 1 at Westciv.

• * * UPDATE * * * Before the learning began I stumbled across this Roadmap to Standards. It just doesn’t get any better than this. Thanks to David at mezzoblue.

I suppose the well will never run dry of CSS tools, techniques and resources. It’s difficult to know where to start. Nick Bradbury has a short list of CSS articles that he’s been reading. These are going into the weekend pile of things to study.

Way back in 1997 or so people apparently figured out how to use tables for Internet page layout. By embedding one table into another and so on, rather minute layout effects could be achieved.

Going back to change that layout on a single page wasn’t all that bad, but a site with fifty similar pages required a lot of editing to bring about consistent changes.

Enter web standards, CSS, XHTML, accessibility, etc. There are techniques for better web site design. There are many, many benefits. The best book (I’ve found) on the subject is Designing With Web Standards. There you’ll find all the benefits along with the reasons that standards-based design will carry us into the future.

Doubters need only to visit the CSS Zen Garden for a glimpse of the vision. Without changing a bit of content or the markup for a page, a CSS change can result in all of the different layouts you see there.

For those who simply think there is nothing to the web-standards drive, you should do two things. Continue to use your WYSIWYG editors or let your 13-year old do it for you, and read what Andy Budd has to say about some recent comments on standards. Actually, you should read Andy’s weblog regularly anyway!

I want to learn how to use CSS to set the width of the text area of a web page this weekend. That may be called ”padding,” but I’m not sure. I also want to learn how to use CSS to format a blockquote the way I normally format them. I’m still embedding or typing tags like center or strong and lots of <br />.

I know this doesn’t sound too ambitious an undertaking to those experienced web designers who read here, but it will likely fill and frustrate my weekend.