More on Style Sheets...Like Hexes and Specifics!

More reading on stylesheets...it's so important though it's understandable. Definitely glad we're spending time getting to the bare bones of what exactly CSS is and how to use it to your advantage. I really believe that if the concept of CSS and how it works can be grasped, then it comes almost naturally. That's why I love the object analogies like those that are used when teaching programmers Java...they just make sense and fit beautifully with CSS.

One thing I noted in Dave Raggett's article that caught my eye was the web safe and named colors section. I definitely want to do a bit more research on web-safe colors; often I use custom hexes and while it doesn't bother me when colors appear slightly differently, I'd like to know what makes the web safe colors so "special"...that is, how they display so perfectly across resolutions and screen variances.

There's a ton of new named colors though since the time of Raggett's article. A more updated list of named colors is here: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp

It's interesting to note that non-web-safe colors have names. I've always been curious about if the named but non-web-safe colors have some other sort of "special" properties as well...especially since it seems so likely that those not familiar with hex would use the named colors.

A huge thing that can cause a designer to rip out their hair that has been touched on but not really delved into in our CSS articles though is specificity. It's obvious that certain tags have to take priority, but how can a designer determine which? And when you're defining several CSS properties, the headache of why that one link is showing up red while the others are blue can drive you crazy. Specifics is something that I've been really trying to understand better because that's where my trip-ups lately in CSS have been.

Here's a few articles that pertain to specifics that have really good explanations (the smashing magazine one even has Darth Vader as an example):
http://css-tricks.com/specifics-on-css-specificity/
http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/27/css-specificity-things-you-should-know/

"Design is a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy" — Erik Adigard