Therapeutic HTML and CSS

Holidays over. Time to return to work! Crisis! How to get back into the tempo of work?

Ease in via HTML and CSS. Both this blog, and my personal blog were sorely in need of a makeover.

Plastic surgeons use scalpels, working for Microsoft: I am going to use the following tools:

  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 beta 2. Apart from ensuring compatibility with the latest browser; the new Developer Tools significantly improves productivity. Found under Tools>Developer Tools (F12) and a new world of HTML, CSS and Javascript editing appears.
  • Google Chrome instead of Firefox 3.0.x. Google Chrome uses some Microsoft Open source technology, and the WebKit render engine is the same as Mac’s Safari. That said, Internet Explorer 8 is stricter with rendering
  • Microsoft Expression Web 2.0 as primary HTML and CSS editing tool. The split code/design view and the CSS intellisense assisted in template work.

 ie8-dev-window

The yellow highlighted “padding-top” on the right-hand-side is the CSS that is acting upon the left-hand-side blue highlighted <li class…>. The beauty of IE8 is that it can inline edit the the blue text indicating the value. After accepting a change, the effect is visible in the IE8 browser window. Perfect for those small pieces of tweaking you need to do.

The Validation menu auto launches HTML, CSS, Feeds, Links and Accessibility checkers that exist in the web standards world.