Stay Ahead Of The CSS Trend With These Helpful Tricks

by A Design Blogger

It's really no secret that CSS can be a royal pain to learn, especially if you're new to the whole scripting gig. The language is very much built like your stereotypical geek-speak jumble of incoherent and oddly spaced words that run together. Even for those who know the language somewhat, it can still be pretty overwhelming, and this has led to communities doing what they always do on the internet: sharing what works for them.

Sprouts of CSS script pop up every now and then to help people implement shortcuts on their sites that get straight to the aesthetic or functional effect that they're after. Pared-down CSS presets that yield attractive effects are elegant consequences of trial and error, cutting out the needless commands to create more intelligent ways of saying, "Do this." Because there are people who get their kicks working with this and sharing them on the web, it's essential for most CSS script-writers to borrow from another's findings.

That is what our precious, CSS-laden Internet was designed to do, anyway.

When you're designing a new layout for your web page, there are gems of advice that other fellow script-writers have shared to help you stay on top of the little stuff. Here are a few points of consideration:

  1. Don't mass-apply antialiasing to your site text; this is what type foundries were designed to handle. You'll find that antialiasing, while in some ways healthy for the aesthetic of the site's typeface, also has a tendency to slim down the lettering until it's almost illegible. You're best to use this for larger text such as titles and headings.

  2. For your Apple-based visitors, it might not be a bad idea to add the scrolling webkit for Safari and iOS in general. This optimizes the scrolling on web pages on Apple's handsets, which yields that all-important smoothing factor that other handsets usually don't emulate as nicely. Basically, it's an accessibility upgrade.

  3. It's not necessary to manually set font kerning since it's already an inherited property thanks to the body aspect. Although adding this parameter might be considered more professional in stature, it's certainly not practical outside of that.