Automatically Reloading Locally Modified CSS Files in the Browser

I’ve been looking for a good live CSS reloader and the Auto Reload extension for Firefox is the best one I’ve found. It doesn’t require any programs or services running outside of the browser, so it’s more self-contained, and doesn’t break when you proxy your outbound traffic or use remote sandboxes. You can use a regular expression for to […]

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Making Xdebug Pretty Not Ugly

Xdebug is an essential development tool for me, but, to be blunt, the default output style is kind of hideous. I looked for a way to customize it through xdebug.ini, but there doesn’t appear to be one. You can, however, use a browser extension like Stylish Stylus (FireFox) or Stylebot (Chrome) to override the default styles with CSS. .xdebug-error { width: […]

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My First Shot at Adaptive Images

One of the first problems you run into when trying to build an adaptive layout is that images, unlike blocks of text, have fixed widths. Ideally we want to use small images on small screens and full sized ones on larger screens. The browser can resize the image on the fly, but the two problems […]

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A Primer on Responsive Web Design

Ben Callahan from Sparkbox shared some good links on responsive web design recently, one of them being this introduction to the subject from A List Apart. One of the things that struck me from the article was that “[mobile] browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access within three to five years.” Another link to Smashing Magazine was a […]

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W3Schools Isn’t Official or Accurate

Divya Manian gave a presentation yesterday at WordCamp Seattle about generating proper markup when creating output from plugins, and she mentioned a site called W3Fools.com, which is basically a protest against W3Schools.com. I didn’t realize until I saw W3Fools, but W3Schools isn’t actually ran by the W3C, and it contains a lot of inaccurate information. […]

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Body Classes Instead of Conditional Stylesheets

I’m thinking I should create a, ‘Duh, why didn’t I think of that?’ category for this. Instead of using conditional stylesheets or CSS hacks to fix Internet Explorer’s obnoxious lack of support for standards, you can conditionally set a class on the html or body tag and target that in your normal stylesheet. This is better for […]

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Sub-pixel letter-spacing in CSS

There’s a thread on the Sitepoint forums about the smallest amount of letter-spacing you can use. Most of the responses are useless, annoying and wrong, but #36 finally gives a good answer. Most browsers only support integer pixel values for letter-spacing. This is a problem because, when it comes to letter-spacing, there’s a big difference between […]

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Preloading Images

UPDATE: Now that all modern browsers (that is, everything except IE8 and older) have support for multiple background images via CSS3, that is my preferred method. It’s detailed by Jeff Starr in his post, Better Image Preloading with CSS3. * * * * I’ve been looking for a good way to preload images for rollovers, […]

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