Spontaneous Derivation

Photography: iowa_spirit_walker

When the CSS revolution came, it was declared: no more tables! Use divs with style!

Well, that’s nice and all, since tables lead so often to nesting tag hell, but few of the revolutionists left behind explicit instructions to normal folks as to how to do this.

Most of us are only concerned with having borders, so we clubbed content over the head with the overkill table because there was no other way. Thankfully, CSS has made our lives easier in this respect. So we’ll cover borders and padding, and how to use them for:

• Simple quote boxes
• Image photo edges
• Images side by side

And of course we’ll also cover the more advanced topic of completely replacing tables with divs.

Continue reading “HTML for Dummies, Part 3: Effects with Borders and Padding, and Replacing Tables with Divs”

i can haz caption?
Photography: eva101

Does CSS frighten you?

You’re in good company. There are plenty of tech-savy people who are also frightened of CSS. And thus it is up to web designers to save the world.

Or is it?

Let’s face it—blogging platforms take care of the CSS plumbing for us. We casual users just want to pick the shower curtains. So here’s a cookbook to applying some basic attributes to text: color, font size, and margins. We’ll have a few more for next time.

And today’s extra special recipe is making captions that stay with images aligned to the left or right, like the pic to the right.

Continue reading “HTML for Dummies, Part 2: Basic CSS Attributes and Captioned Images”

Photography: Martin Kingsley

Are you fed up with the stupid WYSIWYDon’tG visual editor in Wordpress and Blogger?

Trying to just line the f*cking image to the right and have text lined up with its top?

Suffering from drifting image woes?

Welcome to my world. For years, I’ve spent hours wending my way through HTML 3.0 and 4.0, and CSS 1.0 and 2.0. Now I’m paying it forward.

“HTML For Dummies” is a series about working with raw HTML, aimed at people who don’t know very much about it. In fact, this series will work best within the context of a blog, because blogs take care of many things already for you, the least of which is sidebars and basic styling.

Each week we’ll look at a couple very basic tips and a few recipes based on a theme.

This week: why visual editors suck; accessing the HTML editor in Wordpress, Blogger, and LiveJournal; and three recipes for aligning simple images with text.

Continue reading “HTML For Dummies, Part 1: Visual vs HTML, and Image Aligning”