The series of posts on Starting Good CSS Habits begins here.

Now that we have work on improving our HTML in the previous articles, we are ready to start applying some CSS to the page. We will begin by discussing text and fonts.

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The series of posts on Starting Good CSS Habits begins here.

Christoph Wiese, a friend who already has good CSS habits, made some good points I forgot to put in the last post. Before we keep going, it is worth going over them.

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I am often surprised by how much bad HTML is out there. Especially HTML that does not use Cascading Style Sheets yet. CSS has been around for over 10 years now! It was added to HTML in 1997 and well-supported (at least reasonably) in web browsers by 2000. I think the reason many people never upgraded is that they either learned HTML before 2000, they learned it from sources (friends, coworkers, internet, legacy code) from before CSS, or they learned just enough to get a site online and never bothered learning the “right way”.

Legacy sites are not always worth the trouble to update—I know I have plenty of old code still floating around out there—so their flaws are understandable. But some folks are carrying around their bad HTML habits still. If you ask them to code a page they probably know that frames should not be used, so they use a table to layout the page instead. They might use <center> when they want text to center. I see bad code and misused tags all the time. You can “view-source” on many major websites and see bad code by people who should know better.

If that sounds like you or someone you know, keep reading, I will try to help you break your bad habits and start good ones.

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Save the Developers! is hoping to make the lives of web developers easier, while also improving the experience for web users. Their current campaign is Say No To IE 6! which is an attempt to rid the world of Internet Explorer 6.

How? By getting developers to put a bit of JavaScript on their website. Developers can either link to their external JavaScript file or download the script and host it themselves. (I added it to this site.)

If the JavaScript detects the the user’s browser is IE 6, then a small window appears suggesting that they upgrade. Clicking takes the user to their website which contains links to the latest versions of IE 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

They acknowledge that it may take awhile, maybe even a few years, but their goal is to reduce IE 6 usage as much as possible to help usher it into permanent retirement. I think that’s a goal all web developers share.

It is simple, effective and—best of all—won’t bother most users because they won’t see it. Their website will let you preview the effect, even if you don’t have IE 6. If you don’t like the look, just modify the JavaScript to fit your site design. If you don’t want users leaving your site, you can adapt the JavaScript so that the window links to an upgrade page on your own site.

Remember: Every time you upgrade a browser, a developer gets his wings.

Here’s some of the exciting things I didn’t blog about while I was on vacation last week.

• PHP 5.2.4 has been released. The improvements are mostly related to stability and security.
• The first release candidate of Prototype 1.6.0 was announced.
• dev_mode_performance_fixes is a Ruby on Rails plugin to improve development-mode performance by only reloading files that have changed.
• Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor, a Dreamweaver extension for generating CSS, was released.
• A List Apart posted “CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing” by HÃ¥kon Wium Lie. Though the title doesn’t say so, it’s a call to action to get full font support into CSS.
• A List Apart posted “Put Your Content in My Pocket“, by Craig Hockenberry, which has tips on designing web pages for Apple’s iPhone.
• The Ruby East Conference will be September 28, 2007 at Penn State, Great Valley Campus, PA (just west of Philadelphia). Tickets are $100 and limited to 300 people.
• Dmitry Stogov’s PHP namespace implementation has support for constants and David Coallier provides a usage example.

This year Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman and the crew at A List Apart have been putting on series of web standards conferences called An Event Apart. They’ve held events in Boston and Seattle already. Chicago will be later this month and, at least right now, tickets are still available.

This week they announced a fourth event: An Event Apart San Francisco will be held October 4–5 at The Palace Hotel. Tickets will be $795 through September 7 and $895 after that. Their events have been selling out, so if you want to go don’t wait too long.

(Full disclosure: they are clients of mine too.)

Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman and the crew at A List Apart have been putting on series of web standards conferences called An Event Apart. The first conference was in Boston in March. The second event will be in Seattle next month.

Yesterday, they annouced the third of four events for 2007: An Event Apart Chicago will be held August 27–28 at the Chicago Marriott Downtown. Tickets are $795 through July 27, regularly $895. The last two events sold out before the early registration deadline, so if you want to go I wouldn’t wait too long.

I attended An Event Apart Boston and it was quality content with a great atmosphere. The speakers covered web standards, CSS, design principles, accessibility, best practices, and even working with clients. To me, the Chicago schedule looks even better. (Full disclosure: they are clients of mine too.)

Adobe is putting on a multi-city tour called CS3: The Creative License Conference to demo some of their latest CS3 software offerings (Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign) as well as to give design and workflow tutorials and tips.

The tour will take place from mid-May through June in eight cities: Chicago, Austin, San Jose, Toronto, Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York. The first six cities are one-day events while the LA and NYC conferences are two-days long and definitely offer the best value of the bunch.

Let’s kick off with something easy—zebra stripes! What’s that, you ask? It’s what we call it when rows alternate between two colors, usually light and dark. Here’s an example:

Contrasting row colors make it much easier to read. The reader’s eye can easily follow along the row to associate the state with the dollar amount. It’s a useful technique whenever you are outputing reports or lists of data. I’ll demonstrate three ways to do it.

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