In the science realm, we are often confronted with having to look at a dizzying number of flat tables representing experimental data. It wouldn’t hurt to spend a little time thinking about how that information is displayed in it’s native format. And often when we see tables that are ‘nice’, they are rendered as an image, thereby shielding wary and hapless internet searchers from all of the rich and informative data contained therein. I’m often asked to provide feedback on these things, so I was pleased to find a little tutorial with some nice examples of styling tables using CSS3 that I can throw out there. Here you go!
Posts Tagged ‘CSS’
In defense of the vendor prefix
Mar 22nd, 10
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PPK has written a thoughtful post titled CSS vendor prefixes considered harmful, and in it he outlines the case of why browser vendors should cease use of the vendor prefix condition.
I sympathize with the case, but the very opening example we have a problem: border-radius. When varying corner values are involved, vendor implementation consistency breaks down:
-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 10px;
-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 30px;
-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 40px;
-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 20px;
-moz-border-radius-topleft: 10px;
-moz-border-radius-topright: 30px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomright: 40px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 20px;
border-top-left-radius: 10px;
border-top-right-radius: 30px;
border-bottom-right-radius: 40px;
border-bottom-left-radius: 20px;
I’d say vendor prefixes are an unfortunate but necessary construct until things are a bit more solidified – at the very least between browser vendors, and ultimately as written in a W3C recommendation.
What I think is important though is that developers do include the expected latest draft code of CSS3 at the end of their declaration blocks. Shipping code, both from the vendor perspective as well as the web developer perspective speaks volumes. If IE is going to drop vendor prefixes and is going with the latest draft examples, then good on ‘em.
RGBa and -webkit gradients: Yes.
May 27th, 09
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When @malarkey asked if RGBa worked with -webkit gradients, my own curiosity couldn’t resist a quick and fugly test to see. Yes indeed, it works:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Gradient Test</title>
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
body {
background-color: green;
}
div {
background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(rgba(50,50,50,0.8)), to(rgba(80,80,80,0.2)), color-stop(.5,#333333));
width:80%;
height:5em;
margin:0 auto;
padding:1em;
text-align:center;
color:white;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div>Hello World!</div>
</body>
</html>
The woes of CSS color in print typography
Dec 7th, 08
/ 4 Comments
As I was working through some documentation on styling CSS for print recently, I came across an oddity. Colors that I was specifying in my print styles were not getting represented properly at print time. Specify a nice shade of gray for some text? Maybe want to ghost print something very lightly on the printed page. No – not in Firefox. In fact, any shade of gray comes out as black in Gecko browsers. This behavior is only slightly more intelligent in Safari and IE7, but in all cases the user agent makes an assumption about what color of text constitutes being “too light” and then defaults to a darker shade of pale that is handled inconsistently across the various browsers. Printing font colors appears to be a messy situation.
Now the reason why the browser vendors have made this assumption is clear: Printing light text on what is almost always white paper is largely unreadable. Furthermore, printing in pure black, devoid of any complex color mixing, can make printing much faster, because the printer doesn’t have to mix in any red, green, or blue ink and can focus on getting the task done. But what is maddening to the designer trying to achieve accurate color representation in print from their web pages is that all of the major browsers assume that they are smarter than the designer, and recolor the text based on their own inconsistent algorithms. Actually, that may be assuming a bit much on the part of the browsers – sometimes the results defy logic.
To investigate further, I created a testing page. This page runs through some of the various color gamuts and creates a list entry for a number of color variations. The results are surprising… Here are some findings:
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Safari 3: Between rgb(0,0,0) and rgb(107,107,107), things appear fine. But then there is a breakdown between rgb(108,108,108) and rgb(127,127,127) where the text will randomly jump to a light gray – equivalent of rgb(199,199,199). For lack of a better term, I call this area “The Dead Zone,” and we will see it again soon. At rgb(128,128,128), the text color then jumps to black and as you ascend the values towards an expected white color, Safari yields a progressive amount of additional lightness to the text until it finally winds up at around rgb(171,171,171) where it should be 255 for all values.
The Dead Zone also occurs in the red, green, and blue colorspaces. If you fix red at 127, about halfway between the minimum value of 0 and the maximum value of 255, we get a dead zone between rgb(127,100,100) and rgb(127,127,127). Same ratios happen starting at rgb(100,127,100), and at rgb(100,100,127).
Finally, Safari renders rgb(0,255,255), rgb(255,0,255), and rgb(255,255,0) inconsistently from their adjacent color values.
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Gecko browsers such as Firefox, Camino, and Flock print the entire gray space in black. (Exception: Firefox 3 will actually print the color exactly right – see below.) You cannot specify a light gray such as rgb(127,127,127) or anything else. It will always default to pure black whether you like it or not. If you fix a color bucket at 0, you will get semi-accurate color for the rest of the gamut, but the other color combinations will trend towards black text the lighter it gets.
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In Opera 9, gray shades render accurately up until rgb(185,185,185), and then higher values default to black. In the points tested, the same conversion to black happens after values higher than rgb(127,211,211), rgb(255,156,156), rgb(87,255,255), rgb(209,209,0), rgb(193,193,127), and rgb(177,177,255).
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IE7 never gets any lighter than rgb(108,104,102) for grayscale, and the rest of the color spaces don’t seem to allow anything lighter than a midrange hue equivalent to around 110 for any given value.
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One last thing about Gecko browsers: The marker (the little bullet to the left of each list item) will display the correct color value in print, even though the text itself won’t match! Underlines/Overlines/strikethrough will match whatever color the text is though. So at least here you can see what the color was supposed to be…
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The exception as mentioned above is Firefox 3. Firefox 3 has been tested to print the colors exactly as you see them on screen, and is the only browser thus far that works this way in a predictable manner.
The conclusion I draw from all of this is that color in CSS print typography is woefully inconsistent, and I do recommend defaulting to black text in most cases simply because it is so problematic to predict what color you will actually wind up with in print. If you need color, go with a darker shade and test your print output in the four major modern browsers (IE, Safari, Firefox, Opera) to see what you can get away with.
Please feel free to try the test suite for yourself and let me know your findings in the comments or via a pingback.
Foundation Website Creation with CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript
Aug 8th, 08
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I would have announced this earlier, but somehow with the trip to Taiwan, the subsequent jet lag, and the whopper of a cold I had this past week has delayed me from getting this post out until now. But here it is: My book titled “Foundation Website Creation with CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript” is now out! I saw two copies of it today on the shelf at Barnes & Noble in Walnut Creek earlier today (pictured).
This project came up at a real interesting time. I was just starting the final quarter of my masters degree program through University of Denver in computer information systems, and the last thing I wanted to do was to take on extra work. But of course, this opportunity to collaborate on this project was too good to pass up, so I opted for no sleep for a few months and somehow got both done last June. Man, it feels good to be done.
My fellow authors Jonathan Lane and Meitar Moscovitz and I have put together a book that covers a professional introduction to the core technologies involved in front-end website development. In it we have tried to convey modern best practices from a web standards perspective as well as from a user-centric project management perspective to give the emerging web developer a solid foundation as to what to expect in a professional web design workflow. I hope the readers of this book find the information contained therein to be valuable platforms for further exploration and learning.
The book may be ordered from Amazon, and you might even find it on a local bookstore shelf!
author, book, CSS, JavaScript, XHTML