CSS Tutorials
Maybe there’s a technical term that I’m not aware of for this type of centered, line-splitting heading. Whatever it’s called, I’ve used it in the new design of the footer on this site, where I’ve divided the footer into sections with headers that overlay a horizontal line.
I wanted to try to do this as efficiently as possible, and without images. I came up with three solutions with pure CSS and one that uses jQuery.
If you haven’t yet used CSS3 transitions extensively, here’s something you may not have picked up on.
As I’ve outlined before, transitions can be triggered in a number of ways, and even via JavaScript. The reason for this is because the actual transition is not dependent on any particular event. Although it is the event that triggers the transition, the transition itself is completely separate from the event (as it should be).
Because of this, you’ll notice a slightly quirky behaviour if you place the transition on the part of your CSS that triggers the event.
Earlier this month, Chris Coyier posted an article discussing a way to deal with the empty elements that are often needed when doing CSS3 animation.
Chris’s solution is interesting. He basically suggests (and I’m paraphrasing here) that we can give the empty elements semantic value by adding some text in each one to describe what each animated element does, or what mood it conveys. Then, the text in those empty elements can be moved off the page with CSS.
Some people got in a tizzy over the potential SEO penalties that could arise (which I kindly pointed out is probably not an issue) while others seemed to have a problem with Chris’s use of the word “semantic”.
You’ve probably used CSS’s border property often, and in almost all cases you’ve probably set the border-style value to “solid”, which looks exactly the same in every browser.
We all know there are other values for border-style, but it’s likely you’ve never used any of them. You may have used a value of “dashed” or “dotted”, but probably not too often.
I thought it would be interesting to screen capture how all the different browsers display all the different values for border-style. In addition to the screen shots, I’ve provided some observations and I’ve summarized how the different values are supposed to look (according to the specification).
At the beginning of this month I wrote a post accompanied by five demo pages that showed that CSS3 transitions could be triggered with a number of different events/states in CSS.
That alone should help you see how these types of simple animations work. But let’s take this a bit further.
CSS pseudo-classes and media queries (which I used in that other post to trigger the transitions) represent certain states for certain elements. These states occur after specific events on the page. So naturally, CSS3 transitions can also be fired using any JavaScript event. Let’s try a simple click event that toggles a class name.
I often come across instances of animations and other effects that look like perfect candidates to be switched to equivalent CSS3-based solution. I recently came across a website called 84Colors, which belongs to a freelance designer named Cristiana Bardeanu.
On that site, you’ll notice there are a number of subtle animations that integrate nicely with her overall brand and design.
Her animations are done using Flash. I thought it would be fun to grab some of those elements and create a CSS3-based page that mimicked what those Flash-based objects do.
If you’ve seen the code for CSS3 border images then you’re probably familiar with the space and round values for the border-image-repeat property.
Well, in the CSS3 spec, the well-known background-repeat property now includes those two new values (in addition to repeat, repeat-x, repeat-y, and no-repeat — all of which most CSS developers will be thoroughly familiar with).
In CSS, there are some properties that are naturally inherited from parent to child. This is useful because it prevents needing to define that same property for all children.
For example, the font-size property can be set (as it often is) on the <body> element, and virtually every element that is a child of <body> will inherit that font-size setting.
(photo by Mariska van Brederide)
A short time ago I wrote an article that broke down the syntax for coding CSS3 linear gradients from scratch.
Once you get the hang of them, linear gradients are pretty simple to code. Radial gradients, on the other hand, are a little more complex.
So let’s finish off what I started in that earlier post and go through the syntax for radial gradients.
Up to this point, the most common use for CSS3 Transitions has been in conjunction with the well-known CSS :hover pseudo-class.
These types of transitions are pretty common, and you’ve probably seen or used something similar. But transitions are not just limited to use with :hover.
You can animate CSS properties via transitions using some other CSS techniques, a number of which I’ve outlined (with demos) in this article.