Spritebaker has done the rounds a fair bit in web development circles over the past few weeks. It’s a great idea, done well. The only problem is it has the strange effect of making it seem like the page is actually taking longer to load. I take a look at a possible solution.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post in which I adapted an idea from a zOompf article to delay the loading of print stylesheets until after a web page has fully rendered. I’ve decided to convert the code from the original post into a plugin and add it to the WordPress plugin directory.
Recently I stumbled across an article detailing browser performance with the CSS print media type. In most recent browsers the print stylesheet held up rendering.
The article suggested a solution, which I decided to automate for WordPress.
Similar support of rgba and border-radius in modern browsers allows us to use both the old graphical and new css3 methods for rounded corners. This gives us the same look in almost all browsers.
The desire for equal height columns in a CSS layout is nothing new; there are many solutions available, some use JavaScript, others use CSS with negative margins, and then, there’s the faux columns method using background images. All of these methods have their place as perfectly valid solutions, and, depending on the situation, may be the best solution available.
During the week I read Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank’s Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong! At a little over 100 pages it’s a concise explanation of CSS tables and how they will – and an argument why they should – change the way in which web developers work.
Earlier this year, Jonathan Snook wrote an article on why he doesn’t use a reset.css in which he referred to Eric Meyer’s reset, a short time later, Eric Meyer responded with an article of his own. Unlike many discussions on the web, it wasn’t a mudslinging match, but a sincere discussion of the tools available to web developers.