The Ups And Downs Of Using CSS

No Comments »
Margarette Mcbride Said:

When it comes to web designs and creating web layouts, CSS has been considered by many as one of the most widely used form of language for web development. This is because of its several advantages compared to the use of tables. Advantages CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the colors, fonts, and layout. According to several Web design outsourcing Philippines consultants, this separation of files further improved a website’s accessibility, as well as providing flexibility and control on the content, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content. Flexibility By combining CSS with the functionality of a Content Management System, a considerable amount of flexibility can be programmed into content submission forms. This allows a contributor, who may not be familiar or able to understand or edit CSS or HTML code to select the layout of an article or other page they are submitting on-the-fly, in the same form. Separation of content CSS facilitates publication of content in multiple presentation formats based on nominal parameters. According to Web design outsourcing Philippines consultants, nominal parameters include explicit user preferences, different web browsers, the type of device being used to view the content, the geographic location of the user and many other variables. Consistency When CSS is used effectively, in terms of inheritance and “cascading,” a global stylesheet can be used to affect and style elements site-wide. If the situation arises that the styling of the elements should need to be changed or adjusted, these changes can be made easily, simply by editing a few rules in the global stylesheet. Bandwidth efficiency A stylesheet will usually be stored in the browser cache, and can therefore be used on multiple pages without being reloaded, increasing download speeds and reducing data transfer over a network. Progressive enhancement With a simple change of one line, a different stylesheet can be used for the same page. This has advantages for accessibility, as well as providing the ability to tailor a page or site to different target devices. Disadvantages Although many find it advantageous, many have also reported several limitations to its use, particularly with “pure” CSS websites. According to Web design outsourcing Philippines specialists, these limitations include: Inconsistent browser support Selectors are unable to ascend One block declaration cannot explicitly inherit from another Vertical control limitations Absence of expressions Lack of orthogonality Margin collapsing Float containment Lack of multiple backgrounds per element Control of Element Shapes Lack of Variables Lack of column declaration Cannot explicitly declare new scope independently of position Poor Layout Controls for Flexible Layouts Visit http://www.myoptimind.com for more info.

Related Blogs

See full post

Seo November 28th 2009

HTML Code to Add Video Encoder © – Get it Right Now!

No Comments »
Ben Goldman Said:

HTML Code to Add Video Encoder – are you still struggling on adding video(s) to your Site? There is an easy solution for all that. Webvideo is proven to be one of the most effective ways to increase your Site(s) conversion rate. The following quick review describes the latest information about how you can quickly and easily put a movie onto HTML pages.

Quick introduction

HTML Code to Add Video Encoder encodes your videos into compact small sized files called: .FLV, so they can easily play on any of your visitor’s Web browsers. Now comes the easy part where you need to add a short html code onto your html page(s), then all you have to do is adding these new files onto your Website’s Webserver. The following technology creates streaming webvideos for you – they don’t have to be fully downloaded in order to start watching them.

Advantages

The solution described in this article enables us with the following:

It enables you to post your visual message to additional sites such as YouTube. This Web-marketing solution is a fraction of the cost of TV commercials. Multiple (batch) video-files conversion all at once. Videos engage with peoples’ emotions and people purchase based on their emotions. Enables you to select your favorite player skin.

We could list many other important great benefits provided by this technology, simply because it this powerful web-marketing tool provides so many opportunities for quick and creative web-marketers.

On the bottom line

HTML Code to Add Video Encoder is a tool that enables you to spark your visitors’ interest and make them pay more attention to you by using Flash-Videos. Now that you know more about this technology it is advised to evaluate this unique solution so you could truly experience how it can improve the performance of your marketing efforts.

Related Blogs

See full post

Video November 9th 2009

What you need to know about CSS !

No Comments »
Deepak Sharma Said:

sheet is a progressive breakthrough for the advancement of web. Today, more and more browsers are implementing style sheets, opening authors’ eyes to unique features that allow influence over presentation while preserving platform independence. The advantages of style sheets have become – apparent — and the disadvantage of continually creating more HTML tags — galore — for presentation effects with the gradual development of CSS.

Let’s understand CSS in the right perspective.

Style sheets in retrospect

Style sheets have been around in one form or another since the beginnings of HTML in the early 1990s.

As the HTML language grew, however, it came to encompass a wider variety of stylistic capabilities to meet the demands of web developers . With such capabilities, style sheets became less important, and an external language for the purposes of defining style attributes was not widely accepted until the development of CSS.

Teething problems with implementation of CSS

Many implementations of CSS are fraught with inconsistencies, bugs and other Authors have commonly had to use hacks and workarounds in order to obtain consistent results across web browsers and platforms.

One of the most well-known CSS bugs is the Internet Explorer box model bug; box widths are interpreted incorrectly in several versions of the browser, resulting in blocks which appear as expected in most browsers, but are too narrow when viewed in Internet Explorer. The bug can be avoided, but not without some cost in terms of functionality.

This is just one of hundreds of CSS bugs that have been documented in various versions of Internet Explorer,Netscape Mozilla , and Opera, many of which reduce the legibility of documents. The proliferation of such bugs in CSS implementations has made it difficult for designers to achieve a consistent appearance across platforms.

Currently there is strong competition between Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine, Opera’s Presto layout engine, and the KHTML engine used in both Apple’s Safari and the Linux Konqueror browsers – each of them is leading in different aspects of CSS. Internet Explorer remains the worst at rendering CSS by standards set down by World Wide Web Consortium as of 2005.

Some breakthroughs

These problems have preisely led the W3C to revise the CSS2 standard into CSS2.1, which may be regarded as something of a working snapshot of current CSS support. CSS2 properties which no browser had successfully implemented were dropped, and in a few cases, defined behaviours were changed to bring the standard into line with the predominant existing implementations..

What makes style sheets significant enough?

Style sheet represents an enormous step forward for the Web. With the separation of content and presentation between HTML and style sheets, the Web no longer needs to drift away from the strong ideal of platform independence that provided the medium with its initial push of popularity. Authors can finally influence the presentation of documents without leaving pages unreadable to users

A style sheet is made up of style rules that tell a browser how to present a document. There are various ways of linking these style rules to your HTML documents, but the simplest method for starting out is to use HTML’s STYLE element. This element is placed in the document HEAD, and it contains the style rules for the page.

Functionality and Usage of CSS

CSS is well-designed to allow the separation of presentation and structure. Prior to CSS, nearly all of the presentational attributes of an HTML document were contained within the HTML code; all font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders and sizes had to be explicitly described, often repeatedly, in the midst of the HTML code.

CSS allows authors to move much of that information to a stylesheet, resulting in considerably simpler HTML code. The HTML documents become much smaller and web browsers will usually cache sites’ CSS stylesheets. This leads to a reduction in network traffic and noticeably quicker page downloads.

For example, the HTML element h2 specifies that the text contained within it is a level two heading. It has a lower level of importance than h1 headings, but a higher level of importance than h3 headings. This aspect of the h2 element is structural .

Customarily, headings are rendered in decreasing order of size, with h1 as the largest, because larger headings are usually interpreted to have greater importance than smaller ones. Headings are also typically rendered in a bold font in order to give them additional emphasis. The h2 element may be rendered in bold face, and in a font larger than h3 but smaller than h1 . This aspect of the h2 element is presentational .

Prior to CSS, document authors who wanted to assign a specific color, font, size, or other characteristic to all h2 headings had to use the HTML font element for each occurrence of that heading type.

Moreover, CSS can be used with XML, to allow such structured documents to be rendered with full stylistic control over layout, typography, color, and so forth in any suitable user agent or web browser.

CSS has its share of inconsistencies as well

CSS may at times be misused, particularly by the author of web documents. Some developers who are accustomed to designing documents strictly in HTML may overlook or ignore the enabling features of CSS. For instance, a document author who is comfortable with HTML markup that mixes presentation with structure may opt to use strictly embedded CSS styles in all documents. While this may be an improvement over using deprecated HTML presentational markup, it suffers from some of the same problems that mixed-markup HTML does; specifically, it entails a similar amount of document maintenance.

Discrepancies compared: CSS vs programming languages

CSS also shares some pitfalls common with programming languages. In particular, the problem of choosing appropriate names for CSS classes and identifiers may afflict CSS authors. In the attempt to choose descriptive names for CSS classes, authors might associate the class name with desired presentational attributes; for example, a CSS class to be applied to emphasized text might be named “bigred,” implying that it is rendered in a large red font.

While such a choice of naming may be intuitive to the document author, it can cause problems if the author later decides that the emphasized text should instead be green; the author is left with a CSS class called “bigred” that describes something that is green. In this instance, a more appropriate class name might have been “emphasized,” to better describe the purpose or intent of the class, rather than the appearance of elements of that class.

In a programming language, such a misuse might be analogous to using a variable name “five” for a variable which contains the value 5; however, if the value of the variable changes to 7, the name is no longer appropriate.

CSS in a nutshell

CSS is used by both the authors and readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document structure (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS).

This separation provides a number of benefits, including improved content accessibility, greater flexibility and control in the specification of presentational characteristics, and reduced complexity of the structural content. CSS is also capable of controlling the document’s style separately in alternative rendering methods, such as on-screen in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on braille based, tactile devices.

CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. The only way this can be illustrated in a way that gets people excited is by demonstrating what it can truly be, once the reins are placed in the hands of those able to create beauty from structure.

Technology October 26th 2009

Embedded Video HTML Software © – Upload Movies to Your Site!

No Comments »
Ben Goldman Said:

Embedded Video HTML Software – why relying on other VDO hosting Sites while you can easily add video(s) onto your own Site? If you look for a quick way to stream your digital movie(s), you should try this advanced technology. Adding a movie to a Webpage doesn’t have to be a tedious task – read more in the following article.

Some background

Embedded Video HTML Software encodes your videos into compact small sized files called: .FLV, so they can easily play on any of your visitor’s Web browsers. The last step is the easiest – updating your Web page(s) with a short html code and uploading the files onto your Site’s hosting server. The final result of this process are streaming webvideos – they are simultaneously being transferred in real-time so that they are being received in a continuous stream.

What are the main benefits?

Finally, when looking at the bottom line, we can easily identify several important benefits:

It is easier and faster than generating plain text.

Website(s) visitors today respond more to movies than to text.

It helps online businesses to simply convert better.

Multiple (batch) video-files conversion all at once.

It enables you to be more creative and persuasive.

It won’t be that difficult to find other great benefits provided by this technology, simply because it enables you to easily manage this highly effective multimedia technology on your own without being dependant on others.

Summary

Embedded Video HTML Software is highly popular these days due to the fact that it requires almost no special technical knowledge or resources from the user’s side in order to create Flash-Videos. It is time for action, so at this point it is highly advised to watch it in action as this is the best way that truly enables you to experience the advantages mentioned above.

Related Blogs

See full post

Video October 14th 2009

Not All Web Browsers are Created Equal

No Comments »
QT Web Designs Said:

You might not have given it much thought, but the browser your website is viewed on can completely change its appearance. Today there are two main types of browsers: Internet Explorer and Firefox. The purpose of this week’s article is not to get you to change over to Firefox, listing about why it has tabbed browsing, blocks popups, and is generally more stable. No, today we will discuss how the difference between Internet Explorer and Firefox affect your website.

If you haven’t recognized yet by the tone of this email, Internet Explorer 6 (IE 7 is getting better) is a curse on browsing the internet. Besides being a regular target for hackers and bugs, IE has a difficult time loading webpages the way they should be displayed. If you are designing a standard website with flat images you’re fine for the most part, but as soon as you start trying to work with transparent images, or arrangements of images that make your site look polished, Internet Explorer puts the caibosh on your dreams of layered images by filling in any transparent screen with an ugly gray box.

Also if you ever want to line up your site’s content using tables and you would like to left justify your content, sometimes IE doesn’t recognize this and centers all your content until you go into the code and figure it out. Firefox, on the other hand is great, it shows the page the way it was made to be seen, without silly images glitches and the like.

I know that many of you are saying to yourselves: “but hey! aren’t there are other browsers out there like Netscape or Safari?” Basically they are all falling in line with Firefox’s platform and are far less used than Firefox or IE. The stark facts remain, until Microsoft stops installing IE on applications of windows, we will continue to have cross-browser conflicts. At present, 54% of the visitors to QTweb.ca use Internet Explorer.

So what does that mean for you and your website? Not a heck of a lot, if you are a client of QT Web Designs – since we constantly check your website against defects on all current and past versions of major browsers and try to build your site in a way that is accessible and consistent for all. Contact us today if you would like us to see how your site works across several different browser platforms. If you are designing a site yourself, our best advice is to always preview your site on multiple browsers since you never know how it might translate.

For more information about QT Web Designs or our products visit us online at www.qtweb.ca

 

 

Related Blogs

See full post

Internet Marketing September 28th 2009