The Power of CSS

Yzabel / December 5, 2005

I really need to find a good book regarding the art of wielding stylesheets to their full extent. I’ve only used them for basic formatting, I admit, and this is a shame, since there’s just so much I could do with them if taking the time to dive deeper into it.

Recently, I was flipping the pages of an old computer arts-related magazine that I had grabbed at the office (or was it at school?) and never finished; that’s when I stumbled upon an article mentioning effects that could be created on images through the use of stylesheets. The image on the right is a screenshot of what I obtained in my browser thanks to the Alpha filter, and to do so, a simple line of code did the trick. No need to fire off Photoshop or any other graphic tool. This is the reason why I want—no, I need—to learn more. I don’t want to remain standing here with the feeling that I’m brushing past something interesting, when I could in fact embrace it with both my arms.Of course, there’s the problem of browser compatibility, but this is where all the fun lies, isn’t it?

FILED UNDER : Art & Design , Internet

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Comments

  • Chris H

    Oh so true, Yzabel! Like I discovered a simple bit of CSS gives you drop caps (large capitals at beginning of a post) which I find to be a nice touch, and great for drawing the eye. Not yet supported by IE but who cares! :)If you want to see it in action, check my blog (requires Safari, Opera or Firefox)And here’s the code:.entrybody > p:first-child:first-letter {font-size: 3em;font-weight: 600;margin-right: 2px;float: left;color: #1d79c9;line-height: 80%;}Yep, that’s it! Change the size, line height and color to suit. Also change entrybody to whatever the class for your content is called.I wish I had the time to learn CSS.

  • Yzabel

    Ooh, thanks, I’m going to toy with that a little this evening. I’m not sure yet where I could use it, but I don’t doubt I can find a, er, good reason to have fun with that. 😀

  • Deborah

    Try Sitepoint’s HMTL Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS I’d like to get to the point where I don’t have to rely on Photoshop so much to implement graphics on my webpages.

  • Benjamin Solah

    CSS can do so much, I wish I had the patience to learn it. And thanks Chris for the code.

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