June Meeting Report: The Cascade

At our June meeting, we talked about the "cascade" in cascading style sheets. We looked at the different ways of applying styles to a page and how the cascade determines which of conflicting styles is applied to an element.

We reviewed browser default styles and how a user can change those default settings. We then looked at inline, embedded, linked, and imported styles. Where styles conflict, the more specific style sheet will prevail, though the priorities can be reversed by adding "!important" to a style declaration.

I posted a test file at the Sample Pages section of the website (look at the bottom of the page). You can download a zipped folder that contains the page and three style sheets. Open the page in an editor to play with the style definitions and understand how the cascade works. For more help, try HTML Dog which has a number of tutorials.

June 14 Meeting Announcement

The next meeting of the PACS CSS Workshop will be held this Saturday, June 14, at 9-10 am. We are meeting on the second Saturday due to the school schedule. This meeting is the last until September.

The agenda is still being worked on. There are a couple of topics that ought to fit into the session so that we do not run over to next year.

And speaking of next year, we will have an exciting announcement, if you have not already heard, about where PACS will meet next year.

There is the usual wide range of meetings scheduled for this month, including a very timely presentation at the Web Design SIG on Microsoft's Silverlight. Check the PACS website for more information.

Applying Divine Proportion To Your Web Designs | How-To | Smashing Magazine

Following up on our recent discussions at the Workshop and in Web Design, here is an article from Smashing Magazine on Applying Divine Proportion To Your Web Designs. The article adds some more information to our talks about the Rule of Thirds.

May 17 Meeting Report: Grid-Based Design

Our May meeting was about effective ways to lay out webpages.

We started by briefly looking at Dreamweaver templates. We touched on this subject in April when we were talking about Contribute. Templates can be convenient for an individual developer, and in an enterprise setting, templates can enforce controls over changes that can be made on a page by other people editing the site.

We then went on to talk about page layouts and the concept of grid-based design. Many current websites employ a layout that is divided strongly into horizontal sections that can get rather complicated to organize. Using a grid can help to keep a clean design while using complex arrangements. During the discussion, we reviewed the Divine Proportion and noted how grid design can help to use that proportion to arrange material on webpages. We also briefly looked at some tools for setting up grids.

The sites we looked at are listed below.

Design and the Divine Proportion

Grid systems in Web Design

Five Simple Steps to designing grid systems

Column Techniques How-To Smashing Magazine

Blueprint Grid CSS Generator

Blueprint: A CSS Framework

Seven Smooth Steps to Superb Grids

Eric Meyer's CSS SCULPTOR

May 17, 2008 Meeting Announcement

The next session of the PACS CSS Workshop will be this Saturday at 9 - 10.

This month, we will to continue our discussion on tools for using CSS more effectively. We reviewed some in April, and I want to look at a few more this month.

We will start with Dreamweaver templates, just to give a general idea of how they work. The topic is not specific to CSS, but it ties in with the discussion about Contribute that we had last month.

Then I want to show some tools for laying out a webpage with a structure that is more complex than just the header-body-footer format. We will talk about grid-based design, see how it can be used to make modern layouts, and look at what to use to make the process easier.

If that were not enough, thanks to the generosity of Microsoft and Dani Diaz, we have a great raffle giveaway -- a copy of Expression Web, Microsoft's web design tool. The usual rule applies -- current members of PACS qualify for the raffle. We will be checking to confirm membership on this one, so be sure to join or renew your membership if you are not current with PACS.