cssvault - inspiring creativity

emastic is a CSS Framework developed by Vladimir Carrer that features an em-based grid system. Its aim is to

.. resolve the problem of the elastic layout also the problem of default width of the container of the page and to ad one fluid column. Also if its possible to reduce the CSS size to minimum.

The entire library is composed of five CSS files:

• reset.css - based on Eric Meyer reset.css
• grid.css - the core CSS (building all the grids)
• type.css - basic css formatting
• ie.css - resolve some IE bugs
• gadgets.css (new) - plugin

The project is still at its infancy, and documentation is very sparse. It has potential to be a good library though. Kudos to Vladimir!

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Happy halloween from the CSS Vault Team!

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James Donaghue has just released Peppy, a very fast CSS3 compliant JavaScript selector engine. The author claims that it is …

… faster¹ than all other major JavaScript libraries with DOM querying capabilities (Prototype 1.6.0.3, JQuery 1.2.6, MooTools 1.2.1, EXT 2.2, DoJo 1.2.0, YUI 2.6.0). It is faster² than Sizzle by John Resig and it also is cross browser (IE included). Take a look for yourselves, I have a profiling page set up here.

The compressed library only goes up to 10K, which makes it an ideal replacement for bulkier libraries if only for its DOM capabilities. Sizzle author John Resig has however identified three potential issues in Ajaxian’s news entry:

Three big problems that I see:

1. He indiscriminately caches in all browsers - including IE - but *never* invalidates the cache. Since the DOM mutation events don’t fire in Internet Explorer all queries will forever be cached and not update on a requery. This is very, very, bad and will break lots of applications.
2. He copied parts of Sizzle and integrated them into his code without including the original copyright notice (in fact, it appears to have no license information, at all).
3. Where’s the test suite? How do you know that it “works in IE”? Sizzle is currently being run against the MochiKit and jQuery test suites so you can be sure in knowing that the code quality will stand up.

The future of Peppy looks bright, but will it will stand up to Sizzle and other tested libraries in terms of reliability? I sure hope so.

¹ (MajorLibraries - excluding Sizzle) : 4x faster in FF3, 6x faster in FF2,

8x faster in IE7, 3x faster in IE6, 3x faster in Opera 9, 4x faster in Safari 3

² (results compared to Sizzle): 1.2x faster in FF3, 1.3x faster in FF2,

11.1x faster in IE7, 4.5x faster in IE6, 0x faster in Opera 9, 4x faster in Safari 3

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Until majority of the web population starts using browsers capable of displaying CSS2.1, the best way to do broken numbered lists would be to resort to manual numbering. Opera has recently come up with a very good article on how to do automatic numbering, for those of you who wish to adopt early.

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Despite all the buzz that the Google Chrome browser has made since its initial launch, its popularity has been on a downhill trend. Here are 3 reasons why I think this is so:

1. Lack of features - Different users have different needs. Some of them are developers that need to debug their websites or some simply like to customize the look of their browser. Unlike Firefox and IE, there is a serious lack of available applets to extend or customize the browser.
2. Bugs - From installation issues, to frequent crashing, to hanging all the way down to display problems. Chrome’s list of issues make it pale in comparison to a vet like Firefox.
3. Been there, done that - Almost all Google Chrome’s features can be found in other browsers, in one way or another. There are articles about this for Firefox and IE.

Probably Chrome’s only asset at this moment is speed, and while puts to shame all other browsers in this area, apparently that is still not enough to pull people in. Still, there is no denying that Chrome has a lot of potential to become a great browser. It is still at its infancy, so I say give it more time. It took IE and Mozilla (Firefox) over 10 years to get to where they are currently at.

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When Chrome came out one of the first things kurafire did was to test his own website, which uses a bunch of CSS transitions and CSS3 properties. Since it uses the Webkit rendering engine it should be at par with Safari, right?

Wrong. Apparently Chrome uses a lower end graphics engine called Skia, which produces less than satisfactory results, as can be seen in this demo page. Among the missing features are shadows and anti-aliasing, which makes Safari the better browser for CSS handling.

Note that this may be intentional though. Google released Chrome with speed in mind, and this may be one of those trade offs that they had to make.

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Looks like the Google Chrome team really did their homework!

I’m not technical enough to know whether this is the WebKit engine or the Gecko engine doing its job, but both Firefox and Safari do pass the Acid2 test so it’s awesome to have a really slim and fast browser around as an option.

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In 2004, Dave Shea optical communicationstook the CSS rollover where it had never gone before. Now he takes it further still—with a little help from jQuery. Say hello to hover animations that respond to a user’s behavior in ways standards-based sites never could before.

Read the full article

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We have recently registered with TOP.ORGландшафт and I’m happy to announce that we are the #1 for the CSS category, so big w00t!

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Ahmed of Techsoapbox has come up with a short but sweet post on the 10 most important factors in developing HTML. At a glance, this consists of the following rules:

• Load Content First
• Load JavaScript Last
• Load Important Ads First
• Follow HTML Conventions / Standards
• Follow Best Practices For Title Tags (H1, H2, H3, <title>)
• Use UTF-8
• Use Outline:0
• Use Tabindex
• Optimize Your CSS
• Use CSS Sprites

These are 10 simple tips anyone can surely follow. Now if only everyone did, we can surely have a better web browsing experience.

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