53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without

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Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX … More about Vitaly ↬

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CSS is important. And it is being used more and more often. Cascading Style Sheets offer many advantages you don’t have in table-layouts - and first of all a strict separation between layout, or design of the page, and the information, presented on the page. Thus the design of pages can be easily changed, just replacing a css-file with another one. Isn’t it great? Well, actualy, it is. Over the last few years web-developers have written many articles about CSS and developed many useful techniques, which can save you a lot of time - of course, if you are able to find them in time. Below you’ll find a list of techniques we , as web-architects, really couldn’t live without. They are essential and they indeed make our life easier. Let’s take a look at 53 CSS-based techniques you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites. Thanks to all developers who contributed to accessible and usable css-based design over the last few years. We really appreciate it. Thanks! You might want to take a look at the article Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding.

CSS is important. And it is being used more and more often. Cascading Style Sheets offer many advantages you don’t have in table-layouts - and first of all a strict separation between layout, or design of the page, and the information, presented on the page. Thus the design of pages can be easily changed, just replacing a css-file with another one. Isn’t it great? Well, actually, it is.

Over the last few years web-developers have written many articles about CSS and developed many useful techniques, which can save you a lot of time - of course, if you are able to find them in time. Below you’ll find a list of techniques we , as web-architects, really couldn’t live without. They are essential and they indeed make our life easier.

Let’s take a look at 53 CSS-based techniques here at Smashing Mag you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites

1. Sneak Peek Into The Future: CSS Selectors, Level 4

CSS-Technique

2. Getting Started With CSS calc()

CSS-Technique

3. The Problem Of CSS Form Elements

CSS-Technique

4. 5 Powerful Tips And Tricks For Print Style Sheets

CSS-Technique

5. How To Benefit From CSS Generated Content And Counters

Generated content was first introduced in the CSS2 specification. For several years, the feature was used by relatively few Web authors due to inconsistent browser support.

7. CSS3 Transitions: Thank God We Have A Specification!

CSS-Technique

8. Flexbox Is As Easy As Pie – Designing CSS Layouts

CSS-Technique

9. Simple Responsive Images With CSS Background Images

CSS-Technique

10. Absolute Horizontal And Vertical Centering In CSS

Stephen Shaw introduces a technique for perfect horizontal and vertical centering in CSS, at any width or height. The techniques works with percentage-based width/height, min-/max- width, images, position: fixed and even variable content heights.

11. Semantic CSS With Intelligent Selectors

CSS-Technique

12. Designing For Emotion With CSS Hover Effects

CSS-Technique

13. Challenging CSS Best Practices

CSS-Technique

14. Killer Responsive Layouts With CSS Regions

CSS-Technique

15. Understanding CSS Timing Functions

CSS-Technique

16. CSS-Only Solution For UI Tracking

The web is growing up. We are building applications that work entirely in the browser. They are responsive; they have tons of features and work under many devices. We enjoy providing high-quality code that is well structured and tested.

17. Designing For Print With CSS

CSS-Technique

18. Creating Responsive Shapes With Clip-Path And Breaking Out Of The Box

CSS-Technique

19. The Making Of “In Pieces”: Designing an Interactive Exhibition With CSS Clip Paths

CSS-Technique

20. Quantity Ordering With CSS

CSS-Technique

21. Designing Flexible, Maintainable Pie Charts With CSS And SVG

CSS-Technique

22. Constructing CSS Quantity Queries On The Fly

CSS-Technique

23. Understanding Critical CSS

CSS-Technique

24. Laying Out A Flexible Future For Web Design With Flexbox

CSS-Technique

25. An Introduction To PostCSS

CSS-Technique

26. Variables: The Backbone Of CSS Architecture

CSS-Technique

27. An Ultimate Guide To CSS Pseudo-Classes And Pseudo-Elements

CSS-Technique

28. Truly Fluid Typography With vh And vw Units

CSS-Technique

29. Understanding The CSS Property Value Syntax

CSS-Technique

30. CSS 3D Cube

CSS-Technique

31. Element Queries, And How You Can Use Them Today

CSS-Technique

32. Upgrading CSS Animation With Motion Curves

CSS-Technique

33. CSS Inheritance, The Cascade And Global Scope: Your New Old Worst Best Friends

CSS-Technique

34. Let’s Play With Hardware-Accelerated CSS

CSS-Technique

35. A Pure CSS3 Cycling Slideshow

CSS-Technique

36. Beercamp: An Experiment With CSS 3D

CSS-Technique

37. Adventures In The Third Dimension: CSS 3D Transforms

CSS-Technique

38. PrefixFree: Break Free From CSS Prefix Hell

CSS-Technique

39. The Guide To CSS Animation: Principles and Examples

CSS-Technique

40. An Introduction To CSS3 Keyframe Animations

CSS-Technique

41. CSS3 vs. CSS: A Speed Benchmark

CSS-Technique

42. How To Use CSS3 Pseudo-Classes

CSS-Technique

43. Coding Q&A With Chris Coyier: Responsive Sprites And Media Query Efficiency

CSS-Technique

44. CSS Baseline: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

CSS-Technique

45. Why Coding Style Matters

CSS-Technique

46. Classes? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Classes!

CSS-Technique

47. Coding Q&A With Chris Coyier: Box-Sizing and CSS Sprites

CSS-Technique

48. Decoupling HTML From CSS

CSS-Technique

49. CSS Sprites Revisited

CSS-Technique

50. An Introduction To Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS)

CSS-Technique

51. Houdini: Maybe The Most Exciting Development In CSS You’ve Never Heard Of

CSS-Technique

52. Styling And Animating SVGs With CSS

CSS-Technique

53. CSS-Driven Internationalization In JavaScript

CSS-Technique
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