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“I’m trying to think, but nothing happens.” – Curly

Crib notes, quick guides, Cliff Notes, cheat sheets – whatever you choose to call them, they come in handy when the web developer brain goes ___________ .

The guys at Smashing Magazine (we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.) have provided probably over 100 cheat sheets from Ajax to CCS, MySQL to XML. One could print them all out and fill several notebooks full of cheat sheets, but that’s not being environmentally green (unless you’re really green.)

So you are looking to finally take those steps to advance your web design skills to the next level… or maybe you are a newcomer interested in making CSS/HTML/PHP your entry point into the web design world.

Either way, HTML has come a long way since the days of IE and Netscape, when the World Wide Web was a newborn and no standard practices were in place at this time. The obstacle of overcoming either original concepts of this time or the mass of incorrect/irrelevant information on the web is tremendous, but not impossible.

Just in time for the BBQ’s, fireworks, and swimming- here’s a list of ten links that I gathered up with a little something for everyone. Enjoy.

If you work in a web design or development firm, then you are probably already very (if not too) familiar with the various idiosyncrancies across the major browsers. Even before you start to apply the stylesheets you can spot noticable differences in the way the browsers render the html. This is because the major browsers come with a default stylesheet they use to render html when nothing else is available. It is a very simple stylesheet, mainly affecting paragraphs, headings, links, and fonts. This is why, without any styling, unvisited links appear blue with an underline, among other things. While using links is a trivial example, small differences in font sizes and paragraph margins can become a headache and can cause you to start adding unnecessary fluff to your well crafted stylesheets. There are some techniques you can utilize to minimize the damage, or what we in the industry refer to as browser normalization.

Nifty Corners Cube is a javascript library written by Alessandro Fulciniti that enables you to easily implement rounded corners on your page. There are many different utilities out there on the web that do basically the same thing, but you’ll be hard pressed to find one that does it any easier.

If you have ever attempted to implement rounded corners in your markup and css, you’ll find that your markup quickly becomes riddled with presentational divs, loads of images, and the css seems to be playing the role of a bar bouncer. It’s even worse if the content box you have rounded needs to be fluid in any direction.

We at CentreSource have recently been pushing all of our staff to become CSS masters. We’ve been testing, researching, training, and debugging our HTML and CSS code so that we might be able to serve our clients in the best possible ways. One of the newer members of our team, Bob, will be posting a number of documents in the coming weeks about what he’s found during his studies, but in the meantime, I’d like to pass along a great article by Digital Web Magazine called “Markup As A Craft” which goes into depth about the importance of good HTML code. As we in the office have learned, the key to having a good HTML/CSS conversion is starting with good, clean, HTML markup. Hopefully these 21 tips and guidelines will help you on your own person path towards CSS mastery.

Anyone that has written HTML and CSS has undoubtedly, at one time or another, faced a major headache attempting to acheive crossbrowser display uniformity. It’s a problem that’s not going to go away anytime soon, so we all just have to live with it for the time being.

I’ve noticed over the years, that everyone has a different approach to tackling this issue. Some prefer to use multiple stylesheets, one always for IE, the other for everyone else. Some code one stylesheet, but forsake uniformity for subtle, sometimes unnoticable, differences. I myself have used both of these techniques in the past. Not that there is anything wrong with either method; the end goal is to have a webpage that looks roughly the same in all the major browsers (IE 5-6, Firefox, Opera, Safari), and most importantly, without using tables for layout.