Articles By: Louis Lazaris

Recently, Chris Spooner of Line25 wrote a tutorial describing how to create a letterpress effect with CSS3’s text-shadow property.

In another article, Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks showed how he makes all the text links on his website feel more button-like using a simple bit of CSS positioning.

During a recent project I was working on, while messing around with the CSS3 text-shadow property, I serendipitously came across a simple way to combine the two different effects from those two articles to create a letterpress effect on active link states.

The CSS3 Click Chart has been updated to include 4 new CSS3 properties, a few of which I’ve only recently come across.

At this point, most of the cool and trendy stuff has been included in the chart, so nothing new that I add will be of great interest, but I’m continually researching and discovering new properties and enhancements that are part of the CSS3 spec, so I’ll continue to add them over time.

Ever since WordPress burst on the scene and gained huge popularity among designers, developers and Joe Blow bloggers, it has become shockingly easy to create SEO-friendly content. WordPress handles everything for you: Pretty spider-friendly URLs, semantic content, accessibility, and structurally accurate heading tags.

Wait — scratch that last one. I’ve always been suspicious that WordPress’s HTML heading structure was slightly off, and recently my suspicions have been (evidently) confirmed. Two articles have provided some important info to help front-end developers, content strategists, and SEO experts structure their content in a more accessible, semantic, and SEO-friendly manner.

CSS3 is fun to mess around with, and this info chart has certainly kept me busy while helping me to become more familiar with the newest techniques in CSS.

I’ve made updates and modifications to the click chart, including a few improvements to some of the already-existing examples, to make them more specific. The changes are listed below, or you can skip the boring descriptions and just use the demo button to view the updated chart.

If you’ve been developing with CSS for some time now, you’re certainly familiar with the inline-block value for the display property. The most common use for this property/value pair is when getting IE6’s margins to behave.

To briefly explain what I’m talking about, if you float an element in IE6 and give it a margin setting on the same side as the direction of the float, the margin will (strangely) be doubled. You could fix this with an IE6 hack with a margin setting that’s half the value of the original, or you could (in many cases) give the element’s display property a value of inline-block (again in an IE6-only hack or stylesheet). This will resolve the issue in most, if not all circumstances.

Although this IE6 workaround for floated elements has probably been the most useful way to implement the inline-block value, it could serve a much more legitimate purpose if the value itself is better understood.

I’ve added five new items to the CSS3 Click Chart. I also added a couple of filter hacks for IE, and corrected some syntax examples.

Each item on the chart includes a clickable heading that opens an info panel on the bottom of the screen displaying a basic description of the item, along with example syntax. To accommodate the fact that the chart is now more than one screen, I’ve integrated Alen Grakalic’s Easy Slider jQuery plugin.