CSSBEAUTY™

Which email clients support CSS3?. A nice chart that displays CSS3 support on the 7 most popular email clients.

IE-CSS3. Provides Internet Explorer support for several of the popular new styles available in the upcoming CSS3 standard.

jQuery.popeye. An inline lightbox alternative.

Reset gets a reset. Eric Meyer's popular "reset stylesheet" gets a few small changes.

Linux Font Equivalents. Good comparison of default system fonts, for bullet-proofing sites on Ubuntu.

Opening new windows with JavaScript 1.2. Updated version of the popular script for opening new windows without using the target attribute.

Yesterday Simon Collison wrote an interesting post where he asks whether CSS showcases are even needed any more.

Here's a quote from his post:

"Sites like Stylegala and CSS Beauty are still hugely popular and important, but perhaps only as purveyors of fresh and useful news. The showcases themselves are now little more than windows into a transitional era of web design. I think the time has come for showcase sites to diversify - and quickly - or die a death. They were important, inspirational, incessant, and we are all grateful for the role they played. That said, things move on."

I agree, CSS showcases can only last so long without morphing into something more useful. That said, I believe new comers will still find value in a site like this.

We must make a distinction between us experienced developers/designers and newcomers. CSS showcases might not be useful to some of us, but they are plenty useful to those that are still learning.

Heck, to this day schools are still teaching its students to create websites using Frontpage, using tables, nothing is being learned about separation of content from presentation or Web Standards, and what about those people that have been creating sites for years, yet know nothing about CSS and its advantages? What if they want to learn the new ways of doing things? Where will they go for inspiration? books? blogs?

That's where a site like this becomes useful, here you have a nice collection of well developed/designed CSS sites where you can see what new techniques are being used, how they are being implemented, real world examples.

I would like to think a site like CSS Beauty acts as a "hook", first you are intrigued by the looks of a site, then you become curious and want to learn how the site was developed, all of the sudden you are interested in Web Standards.

Is that not reason enough for a CSS gallery to exist?

I myself was once "hooked" when looking at a certain blog, captivated by its design. I guess you could I say I caught the "CSS Bug" because of it.

I'll be honest, I saw there was a need for change a long time ago, with the selling of CSS Vault, then UnmatchedStyle.

This is why CSS Beauty has been "diversifying", by adding a news section, a community forum, a job listing board, and recently by the addition of contributors. All for a good cause, to help those newcomers.

I am sad to see Stylegala being sold, and Web Standards Awards being closed down, but this motivates me even more to continue working on CSS Beauty.

So is this the end for CSS Showcases? the end of CSS Beauty?

I think not.

Alex Giron

(56) May 18, 2006

JavaScript instead of Target="_blank". Using semantic XHTML and unobtrusive JavaScript to create a nice pop-up window that works in Strict doctypes.

A Guide to CSS Support in Email. Discusses CSS support on each of the popular email environments.

DOMinclude. A library that allows you to add inline dynamic includes of content instead of using window popups.

Lightbox Gone Wild. A more flexible implementation of the popular lightbox script.

Form Help without Popups. Help text for forms without having to open a new window.