kashit - Ehsan Quddusi

With the advent of CSS, the power of presentation in web pages was highly increased. Transition from old style writing of HTML pages to new wave of full life UIs has brought with it many concerns for the web designers. The major concern for web designers nowadays is to create cross browser complaint websites with as little variation across browsers as possible. Internet Explorer 6 being the major problem creator among the lot. Since IE6 still holds 10.2% of the browser market share, according to w3schools browser statistics for January 2010, it needs to be tackled. Most of these problems are mainly caused due to variation in the implementation of specifications by browser vendors.

Google Chrome has been impressive till date with its light weight, quick startup & performance. Since its introduction, the most sought feature has been the availability of an extension system, the feature currently dominated by Firefox. Finally the extension system is there in beta with impressive 1000+ extensions already in the store after its launch in December 2009.

The main attraction of firefox is its customizable environment for the users to meet their tastes and requirements in terms of themes and plugins. As themes were already available with the chrome, the introduction of extension system brings it closer to firefox in terms of customization.

Here I am listing some of the chrome extensions available for web designers & developers.

I hope you will have read my previous article on CSS Best Practices. This is another topic on the same subject, just to increase your knowledge of the CSS golden rules, tips & tricks. The inspiration for this article is from my day to day experience with the same.

CSS Sprites is a technique by which we can combine multiple images in a single big image and position the various parts of this big image with our elements using pure CSS attributes. The primary objective behind using CSS Sprites is to decrease the number of HTTP requests and thus decreasing the request stress on server. The idea behind CSS Sprites is to consolidate multiple images into one sprite and then selectively display portions of this sprite with positioning. It starts by creating a larger CSS Sprite by grouping more than one images (usually icons) together and aligning them in proper grid style to aid the positioning. Then it is aligning used a proper positioning values on the webpages to show their respective images. This way it decreases the number of HTTP requests and thus increases the overall speed of webpages.

CSS Best Practices is the topic that I had been planning to write on for months. As CSS is the order of the day as far as web related UI is concerned, more people are moving to it. CSS isn’t always easy to deal with. CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you’re not sure which selectors are applied to document elements. CSS Best Practices covers some important and easy to remember tricks and tips to better manage, organise and develop your CSS Snippets.

Wordpress, one of the most popular blogging platforms of the world, has a large user base throughout the world. One of the main attractions for its users is the great themes contributed by the thousands of users around the world. Though in general, bloggers use the themes already available and contributed by other users, but sometimes there is a need to customize the theme or create a new theme from the scratch. Without getting to much in the history, let me show you how to create a Wordpress theme with as little expertise as possible. Keep in mind that developing a Wordpress theme doesnot require PHP expertise from your side. Just a little of CSS and working knowledge of XHTML / PHP will work.

Like GIFs and JPEGs, PNG images are ideal for web use. Like GIFs, the PNG is great for displaying small images with few colors, like logos and icons. Also, PNGs sport a few advantages over GIF images. Most notably, they support alpha transparency.

What is alpha-transparency? GIF files are only capable of displaying a pixel as either completely transparent or completely opaque: this is known as binary transparency. When an image contains alpha layers, however, parts of an image can be partially transparent. You can specify a level of transparency from 0 to 255.