Specificity is not only the aspect of CSS that will make any fluent presentation stop in its tracks (or am I the only one who has problems pronouncing it?), it is also a very important part of CSS design. Basically it allows to override settings defined earlier in a stylesheet by adding other element, class or ID names.

h1{color:#fff;background:#369;}
will not apply any longer when you add another id of an element the h1 resides in:
#home h1{color:#000;background:#f8f8f8;}

While it is easy to trial and error initially, the more you mix and match elements, IDs and classes the harder it can get to predict the outcome.

Andy couldn’t stop his nerdy alter ego and came up with a star wars based, wonderful cheatsheet on the subject which initially had some errors that Molly rectified.

Wonderful stuff and something to hang up in the office.

I’ve been too busy this week to actually read the new webdesign magazine released by the folks at particletree. The first issue of Treehouse can be downloaded for free and you have a special offer of the next few issues for 15 dollars.

From a first glance I like what I see, although I am not too good with reading PDFs on this work machine (Thinkpad T40). For some reason I’d prefer a one column version, which could also be great for handhelds.

The content is a good mix of coding tips, best of the web links and interviews with some faces of web design / development. I am not too much of a fan of interviews that are not related to a product release or change, but focused on the person itself. We are web developers, not pop stars or big brother participants. Bad enough that every news agent is stacked with celebrity magazines.

I will buy the issues and see how it goes. A general “thumbs up” to particletree for taking the leap into developing this – it is a lot more work than it looks.

I kept myself busy with some webdesign again the last few days as my book chapter is reviewed by the technical editor and I had some promises to fulfil. So take a peek at two new web site designs:

Pop-Portraits.com

Pop-Portraits is the hobby and artistic outlet of Stephen Wickstead, a designer I am working with at my employers. What he does is nice paintings in very few colours, and he also takes commissioned work. The whole design was defined by him and mine was to deliver the PHP, XHTML, CSS and the JavaScript doing the donkey work of rendering his ideas.

Feast your eyes on some nice pop portraits

Onlinetools.org rebranding

Realising that nobody reads instructions on a web site before downloading scripts and seeing that some were just painfully outdated, I stripped down the site to the bare minimum – a list of all the scripts and tools I still consider good. I then wondered where to put a navigation and thought about the idea of making the whole page just a list and spice it up with some JavaScript shenanigans.

Take a peek at the new onlinetools.org

On almost any mailing list or forum you still encounter developers venting their frustration as to how buggy CSS is and how hard it is to switch from table layouts to CSS layouts. A lot of this frustration is not based on bad browsers or missing elements and concepts in CSS, it is based on an old school view of web design. Web design was never easy, but it can be if we start embracing the complexity of our development environment and be flexible enough to develop for it (more…)

Are you scrounging ebay or price comparison sites daily for deals? If so, give rectifi a go. It is a search engine that donates 92% (no idea how they came up with that number) of their advertising income to charities.

Doesn’t cost you anything, and it is a nice idea.