Articles By: Louis Lazaris

CSS Things That Don’t Occupy Space

By Louis Lazaris / November 13, 2012 / 14 Comments

In most cases, when you place an element on the page in your markup, if you don’t specify any special styles, it will occupy exactly the same space that it appears to occupy visually.

In other words, if you place a box sized at 200px by 200px on your page, anything you place after it in the source order, with no further styles added, will occupy the space below or beside the green box, outside of those set boundaries.

But not everything on an HTML page occupies space that is honored by other elements. I thought it would be interesting to list and describe all the things in CSS that don’t occupy this kind of physical space in an HTML document.

Custom Zenburn Theme for Sublime Text 2

By Louis Lazaris / November 2, 2012 / 13 Comments

For a while now, I’ve been using Notepad++ with a customized version of the Zenburn theme, which was originally created for Vim.

This week I finally started fiddling around with Sublime Text 2, and I like what I’ve seen. Although I like the default Monakai theme, I prefer my old customized version of Zenburn from Notepad++. So I forked the Zenburn repo and made my alterations.

Clearing Floats: Why is it Necessary Even in “Modern” Browsers?

By Louis Lazaris / October 23, 2012 / 26 Comments

The other day, someone asked me the following question: “If I understand it right clear float is automatic in most modern browsers right?”

If you’re new to CSS, then it would seem that the answer to this question should be “yes, of course — modern browsers don’t have these types of bugs!” But the necessity to clear floats is not a browser bug; it’s actually, well, more of a CSS feature. And it’s still needed in so-called “modern” browsers (assuming you’re using floats for layout).

Animation Scripts, Libraries and Plugins

By Louis Lazaris / October 18, 2012 / 7 Comments

Recently, I’ve bookmarked a bunch of animation-related scripts, libraries, and plugins. Although CSS3 has certainly made animation easier for us, sometimes we need a little bit of help.

There are other libraries that are more popular than these (like Raphaël.js), but these are some mostly lesser-known scripts that I’ve stumbled across in recent months.

JavaScript Array Methods Reference

By Louis Lazaris / October 10, 2012 / 14 Comments

Back in July I wrote a post called JavaScript String Methods Reference, outlining many of the ways strings can be manipulated in JavaScript.

Another area where JavaScript has a number of different methods available for use is Array manipulation, which I’ll cover in this post. As usual, I’ll do my best to keep it simple and accurate, but if I’ve erred or if you think I’ve omitted anything important, please comment.

Default CSS Display Values for Different HTML Elements

By Louis Lazaris / September 25, 2012 / 20 Comments

Every element in an HTML document accepts a value for the CSS display property. The possible values you can use for display are many.

The three most commonly used values are none, block, and inline. But what if you don’t define a display value for an element? Well, all elements have an initial or default state for their display value. Let’s consider some of these and see some interesting things you might not have known.

New Section: The CSS Network

By Louis Lazaris / September 24, 2012 / 4 Comments

If you’ve followed Smashing Magazine for some time, you know that they at one time had a section of their site called “The Smashing Network” which had a feed of links to articles from various sites in the web development and design blogging industry. That section is now gone, though.

To some extent, I miss the Smashing Network. Not all of the articles in the Smashing Network were of great quality, but I liked that I could scan a few pages of links every couple of days to see what kinds of CSS articles were being published in the Network.

Web Development for Beginners (Resources)

By Louis Lazaris / September 18, 2012 / 44 Comments

While I usually try to write stuff that’s geared more to experienced developers, I don’t want to neglect those who are just starting out.

I’ve been collecting links to beginners resources for web development for some time now, so I thought I’d share that list here. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

Book Giveaway: Think Like a Programmer

By Louis Lazaris / September 14, 2012 / 27 Comments

The folks over at No Starch press were kind of enough to give me a review copy of one of their new releases Think Like a Programmer by V. Anton Spraul.

Since I didn’t think I could read the book and write a review any time soon, to help them promote what I believe is a valuable book for anyone who solves problems with code, I offered to give away two copies on my site, and they gladly agreed.

Introducing: CSSValues.com

By Louis Lazaris / September 11, 2012 / 4 Comments

There are quite a few references online for finding detailed info on CSS properties. I find, however, that most of them usually have more than what I’m looking for — and don’t even get me started on the overly-convoluted CSS specs. Truth is, sometimes I just want to know which values are valid for a particular property, and nothing more. So I built a quick-reference site that does just that.

It’s called: CSS Values.