Lightsurgery

Photo by Or Hiltch

First off is ‘10 Easy jQuery Tricks for Designers‘ [http://to.ly/rnc] – featuring things like automatic cross-browser rounded courners, and scrollable content boxes, all of which without the use of JavaScript can make for some *huge* CSS. One of the problems with maintaining such huge (and often multiple stylesheets is that over time we forget which selectors are redundant. Often it could be a week-long job of tirelessly cross referencing styles, which frankly is enough to make anyone put that job on the back-burner! Fortunately a list has cropped up called ‘Detecting unused CSS selectors‘ [http://to.ly/rII]. In this post is a list of the top programs, addons and web-based apps for detecting and cleaning those unused classes. It includes a firefox plugin that looks particularly interesting.

Of course this post and lots like it list items in a top-down fashion, and it’s often hard to know whether semantically this is an un-ordered list or tabular data. Both of these have taken on new properties and should be styled accordingly (XOXO Microformatting for un-ordered lists, and the use of <th> etc for tabular data). It can be a real pain to properly style these, so often it becomes an after-thought.
So when I spotted the ‘CSS Table Gallery‘ [http://to.ly/rIL] with free templates, I thought it would be worth sharing as something invaluable to a designers arsenal. These kinds of background knowledge reference sites can be so important when trying to improve your own skills as a designer/coder.

One of the things that I think is also very important is cutting down the use of long-hand styles and repeated references. A bookmarked site like ‘CSS Shorthand – A Guide to Cleaner and Faster Coding‘ [http://to.ly/rIJ] can be invaluable, and so useful to creating cleaner, smaller CSS.