Today I presented at WDCNZ 2011 in Wellington. The details of my presentation are below! I had a great time and if you were there I hope you enjoyed the day.
Preparation H
“CSS sucks! Can we please go back to intuitive tables?” – Anonymous developer
“Why does CSS make me want to kill myself? How do I make it OBEY me?” – Anonymous aspiring dictator
“I’m having a bad day. CSS ate my brains.” – Anonymous zombie
CSS may seem unreliable, but actually it’s just a bit dumb. We’ll take a look at the dumbest bits of CSS, and we’ll check out CSS’s optional, shiny new brain, SASS and Compass.
I’m speaking at a conference called WebDevCon in Wellington this July. Here’s a screenshot of their website.
“You call that development?”
“Well, yeah,” I say.
“I mean, it’s just a string.”
“What’s a string?”
“No, it’s a string in chaos. That’s the logic, a string of chaos.”
“…”
“We speak different languages,” I said.
§
Why do developers refuse to learn CSS? Do they find it boring? Does it pale in comparison to other languages?
I think of it as the icing on a cake.1
If you find CSS hard, chances are you haven’t implemented stuff to make it easy. Here are a few quick tips.
- Use a reset stylesheet. These styles lay the foundation of your website.2 Paste this CSS from Eric Meyer or this CSS from Yahoo at the top of your stylesheet
- Use browser-specific styles. Use this bit of JavaScript to append the user’s browser to the body tag.3 If a visual bug is found in a browser, say IE6, create a targeted class to squash that bug. For example, .ext-ie6 div.box will only apply this class to IE64
- Use Firebug. Firebug is an excellent debugger for CSS and JavaScript. It makes fixing errors “easy as”
That’s all you need to make CSS easy.
1. Icing is the best part, too.
2. Some developers are against them. Ignore those guys. I think most of them play the devil’s advocate to get page hits.
3. This JS forms the foundation for Yahoo’s JS library, Ext. It’s very good, better than Prototype.
4. You do not need to use conditional stylesheets for Internet Explorer nowadays.
FullCodePress-ure
Today’s I leave for Sydney to compete against Australia in FullCodePress. FCP is a competition to “build a fully-operational website for a non-profit organisation in 24 hours.”
My team is awesome, and we’re going to win. The competition starts on Saturday. Here are some details:
Can I see the event online?
The two teams will be building their websites online, and you can watch the progress on the two websites in real time. The web addresses will be announced at 9.30am on Saturday at http://www.fullcodepress.com.
The New Zealand team
- Ali Green
- Jeffrey Wegesin
- Mark Rickerby
- Peter Johnston
- Steve Dennis
- Thomas Scovell
- Zef Fugaz
Photo and video action:
Blog action:
Who is running the event:
24 hours without sleep! I’m going to feel like a student. Wish us luck…
I’m going to Australia in August to compete against the Aussies for FullCodePress 2007!
Each team (New Zealand and Australia) will build a website in one day for a non-profit organization.
“At the end of 24 hours, a team of judges will review both sites and select the winner. International pride, bragging rights and a trophy will follow for the winning team.”
Wish us luck!
Be warned, this post is for me, and for anyone who likes or dislikes workarounds for common CSS problems (i.e. you hate IE).
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