CSS Tools « The Choppr

Some Free Tools to Speed up Web Development

photo via flickr (credit)

It won’t give you 100% freedom to design anything you like, but it can speed up your design process greatly and free up your hands to do the coding you really want.

Suggestions:

960 http://960.gs/ – grid layout system
Tripoli http://devkick.com/lab/tripoli/ – really good typography, but no grid system
YUI Grids http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/ – very customizable (to the point of overkill) grid system
Blueprint http://www.blueprintcss.org/ – grid system and basic typography
BlueTrip http://www.bluetrip.org – a hybrid system, mixing the best of the Blueprint grid with the best of the Tripoli typography

Free Online Books, Tools, Software on CSS

A variety of online books on CSS throng the canvas of free download websites, and assists readers to gain more knowledge on CSS basics.

Following is a list of free CSS books:

JustSTyle CSS Editor 1.1 – This book describes a list of tools required for creating and editing Cascade Style Sheets. Written entirely in Java(TM) with a Swing GUI, JustSTyle works on different platforms, such as OS/2, Linux, Mac OS, Windows and others.
CSS Tab Designer 2.0.0 – this is unique and easy to use software that helps you to design CSS-based lists and tabs visually and without any special requirement of programming language.
AdrianSoft Ebook Builder Standard Edition 2.4 – This free e-book introduces AdrianSoft eBook Builder that further creates professional e-book, e-presentation, e-brochure, photo album, offline websites and many more
Rapid CSS Editor 2006 7.3 – this free book allows quick reading, teaches you easy creation and smooth editing of cascading style sheets of any complexity. You can write your own style sheets and HTML code manually or let the program conduct it for you. In each of these cases, it is easy because of various helpful features like Inspector and Auto Complete.
StyleSpread 2.3 – This free e-book is no-compromise CSS editor powered to make professionals work faster and smoother. This book guarantees you a substantial productivity increase, regardless of what CSS editing tools, that you are using currently.
Appointment Book 2.1.1 – This is a free appointment book software with SMS Messenger.
Style Studio 3.0 – a free book on powerful HTML/CSS Editot with full support to W3C CSS standards, validator, IntelliSense, smart preview, many wizards, CSS indent, CSS link/@import. 200+options, instant syntax coloring and MS Office 2000/XP UI!
Cascading Style Sheets by Example by Steve Callihan -Aimed at the beginner to intermediate style sheet writer, this book assists to teach CSS from the ground level. The reader is taught as to what are style sheets and how to use them effectively? It also teaches you other CSS specifications through reference information and a horde of CSS articles/tutorials.
Cascading Stylesheet 2 by Eric Meyer – this book explains the basic concepts of cascading style sheets before examining some of the highly powerful techniques available to the web developer. This book helps you to understand style sheets so that you can impart a quick and consistent look, so very essential for “branding” a site. Apart from this, the book also covers how to set up style sheets for printing and audio browsers. This book is highly effective as it allows you to understand what your targeted audience wants to do with your style sheets.

If you are looking for a good CSS book, the above-mentioned books are simply great as it help you learn all the CSS details and intricacies.

Best online CSS book

One of the best online CSS book is “Sams teach yourself CSS in 24 hours” by Kynn Bartlett. It provides a quick and easy introduction to creating professional web sites with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While browser support of CSS has enhanced dramatically with the latest introduction of versions 6 of Internet Explorer, AOL clients and Netscape. The author is a three-time President, active instructor in HTML Writers Guild and board member. This book acts as a prerequisite bridge between HTML coding and higher-level programming technologies like XHTML, Java, JavaScript and Flash. The foremost step of every successful web designer toward professional and stable web designing is their ability to learn to apply CSS. This book allows every reader with high dimensions of learning. One of the prerequisites for learning higher languages like Java and Flash, JavaScript, CSS is gaining increasing support among major browsers like Internet Explorer, Netscape, and new comers like Opera, Mozilla and NeoPlanet.

The main key to successful CSS implementation is its understanding of how different browsers use and interpret CSS. This tutorial takes the unique position of teaching the reader how to make smart decisions about how and when to apply CSS, based on browser support and intended effects. In a 24hour-straight forward time, there are hourly lessons and exercises that will help the reader to learn by accomplishing hands-on tasks that can be applied to their own sites at every hour.

Kynn Bartlet has taught thousands of basic principles of good web design through online courses and his participation in W3C technical working groups, Sweb Standards project education FAQ and HTML Writers Guild [president, board member and instructor]. Bartlett is a frequent speaker at conferences and imparts consulting for businesses and government agencies.

Useful CSS Tools

A variety of CSS tools allows you to create wonders with CSS in your website.

Following are some of the best-used tools of CSS:

CSS Creator – this tool creates a fluid or fixed width floated column layout, with up to 3 columns, header and footer. Values for it can be specified in pixels, percentages or ems.

Firdamatic – this is an online table-less layout generator that allows you to create and customize layouts easily only by completing forms, creating skin for Firdamatic-based layout.

Layout-o-Matic – this is a tool that allows you to select a layout table, its width and height, and several other options to the left, and then click on Download or view and pick up the multi-column CSS layout starter kit.

CSS Rounded Box Generator – this tool allows to generate HTML and CSS for rounded corner boxes.

CSS HTML PHP Website Template Maker – This is a PHP/HTML/CSS template generator that creates a two-column layout with both the header and footer. This PHP/CSS style sheet template generator outputs full featured table less code i.e. tables are NOT used for template with the column layout. The resulting template is a combination of several files i.e. it is a true PHP, HTML, CSS template that makes it absolutely easy to control single or multiple pages in a web site.

JotForm – this is a great web based WYSIWYG form builder that acts as a great CSS tools. You can select a form type [Satisfaction Survey, Suggest Website, Job Application, Contact Us, Party RSVP, Submit Product, Membership Registration and Wedding Attendance Reservation and others]. Your new form will be created with all the default fields on the selected form.

Type Tester- an online application that helps in comparison of fonts for the screen. The primary role is to make web designers feel at ease. As the new fonts are bundled into the operating system, a list of common fonts will be updated. The code for type tester is XHTML, styled with the finest CSS and driven by JavaScript for manipulating DOM structures. However, typesetters will never work without JavaScript enabled.

Em Calculator – this is a small JavaScript tool that helps in making scalable and accessible CSS design. However, it also converts sizes in pixels to relative em units, which are further based on text size.

CSS Tab Designer – this is unique and easy to use software that helps you to design CSS based list and tabs visually and without any sound programming knowledge required. With the CSS tab designer, you can quickly design your list visually and choose from a wide variety of styles/colors.

Jan 24, 2008 Linkage – Online Validators

If you would like to check you sites and validated them you can use the online validators below.

W3 HTML with CSS or CSS only validator
W3 HTML validator that checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML
W3 link checker that reads an HTML or XHTML document and extracts a list of anchors and links
W3C Feed Validation Service, a free service that checks the syntax of Atom or RSS feeds
WDG HTML Validator for HTML and XHTML validation
Feed Validator for Atom and RSS and KML
Web 2.0 Validator
Semantics validator by W3, geared by an XSLT stylesheet, tries to extract some information from a HTML semantic rich document. It only uses informations available through a good usage of the semantics defined in HTML
W3 RDF validation service is based on Another RDF Parser (ARP). It currenlty uses version 2-alpha-1
WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues
WAVE is a web accessibility evaluation tool
The HiSoftware Cynthia Says portal is a web content accessibility validation solution

CSS Validation Tools

A host of CSS validation tools allows you to make use of validation services.

CSS Check

This is WDG’s online validator for CSS. You can either check online web pages or files/folders from your own notebook PC. It has a very friendly approach to its set of reports and provides hints/warnings as well as a set of error.

Enter the URL of a Cascading Style Sheet, or enter your style sheet directly. Alternate to this, you can also use CSS CheckUp to check files/folders on your computer.

W3C CSS Validation Service

With W3C CSS Validation Service you can validate your style sheets either at the site or download it in your own computer.

This is the best a way to check cascading style sheets (CSS) and (X)HTML documents with the style sheets.

CSE HTML Validator

CSE HTML Validator integrates within Macromedia HomeSite, Bradsoft TopStyle and several other programs. It also stands alone as an HTML validator or syntax checker, link checking program, CSS validator and spelling checker too. There are hosts of numerous setting for different types of validation, which are quite user-friendly and customizable. These are quite easy to use and great programs.

The Web Developer Extension

The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

This would be your best CSS/XHTML helper I use it for debugging and testing and the best thing about it is that it’s portable and you can have it installed on any major browser and operating system. Check it out and instead of going back in forth in 4 different windows you can do it all in one.

What’s my Font?

Have you had the problem to lose font files or not remember the name of a certain font. It happens a lot you pre-install your Windows or Photoshop, misplace or delete files. I had a similar problem, had a font that used for sIFR and have converted the font into a flash file with name (font.swf). Year later I needed to change some images that used the same font and didn’t have the font name. Here is a cool tool that can help you find and narrow your search by using an image with your font. It’s not 100% accurate but it will at least find a font that is very close to the one you’ve used. Check it out!

WhatTheFont

WhatTheFont supports most common image formats, for example GIF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP. The maximum image size is around 360 x 275 pixels. The ideal letter height for the best search result is about 100 pixels.

sIFR – Make Your Headlines Prettier with Flash

sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a technology that allows you to replace text elements on screen with Flash equivalents. sIFR is the result of many hundreds of hours of designing, scripting, testing, and debugging by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben. Mike, Mark and an invaluable stable of beta testers, supporters, and educators like Stephanie Sullivan and Danilo Celic of Community MX completely rebuilt a DOM replacement method originally conceived by Shaun Inman into a high quality cross-browser, cross-platform typography solution for the masses.

You can find the stable version of sIFR 2.0 on Mike Davidson’s Blog. Also there is sIFR 3.0 which still in beta but provides some better font rendering from the previous versions [sIFR 3.0 beta]