I began teaching myself Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in 2004 when I graduated from University and started work in website development. At the time it was difficult to find well written resources that thoroughly explained how various CSS techniques worked.

In the past few years, CSS adoption has increased dramatically. These days most high profile websites use CSS rather than tables for their design. Although amazon.co.uk and bbc news still have partially table based layouts, naughty!

Thankfully they are now many excellent articles available on CSS. Yesterday while working my way though some bug fixes on phuser.com I stumbled upon some brilliant ones that I hadn’t read before.

Emil Stenstrom has written an excellent article on how to Cross-browser CSS for your site. One tip I picked up is to start your CSS files with:

This will remove all default element stylings which can be a right pain in the @r$e when trying to get your site to render consistently cross browser. A clever little hack he suggests is the "star html" hack:

This is valid CSS but only IE will apply "code" to "#element". I think its much cleaner than other browser hacks I’ve seen. Many of his articles are well worth a read but I would especially recommend his guide on structuring large CSS files . Real hackers don't use css is more amusing than useful but still interesting.

For people wanting to learn more about CSS and web design techniques in general A List Apart is well worth checking out. Also worth a mention is this fix for the two columns with equal height layout, it uses Javascript instead of the normal background image fix.
/* Pete Graham */

I stumbled upon a new fractal gallery today. Being a fractal fiend this excited me greatly and I spent a very enjoyable lunchbreak listening to "Wish you were here" by Pink Floyd and contemplating the fractal colours and compositions. If I had a beard, stroking it whilst studying the fractals would have been an excellent touch.

One of the Fractals is pictured above, they have been created by Melissa D. Binde and her website is fractality.com. Heres a link to my last post about fractals.

# Pete Graham