Tuesday, July 01, 2003
CSS, XML, XSLT, oh my
Check this out, an XML-only blog called
AdventCode, with no HTML in sight . It works on Moz, IE6, cool new browsers, etc. If you check the code, it references a 16.5 KB XSL stylesheet with javascript and css embedded that gets cached by the browser, so all subsequent client downloads are the lean and semantically-rich XML files. Semantically-rich = fancy talk for very descriptive. That's a good thing. And lean = lower file size, loads faster. For example, the home page xml file is only 8.5 KB.
Another cool CSS experiment in the online world: the
CSS Zen Garden, which allows for designers to submit their beautiful CSS stylesheets to modify the same HTML code. Click on the different stylesheets on the right to switch views. It's amazing to see how the same HTML can be transformed so drastically.
If that's whet your appetite for CSS, here's a nice introduction to
how to lay out pages with it:
CSS positioning.
And if you're still not sick of CSS by now and/or rapidly losing all hope about this post talking about non-web stuff, then check out this neat blog post on
how to make icon-styled headings out of pure CSS and no graphics. Basically, using thin bevels and rollovers makes neat widgets out of plain jane HTML lists. SimpleBits also has a very useful
mini-tabs effect in CSS that's worth looking at.
Very fun cool stuff. Well, if you're a dork. Like me. Then you're my kind of dork. Which makes you not a dork in my book. If that matters at all.