Once you have your rough draft laid out in CSS, and you need to start adding style, Rounded Cornr can save you a lot of time. Rounded Cornr quickly and easily creates images and CSS code for different box styles in an easy to use interface. It also offers an option to code it using only one image for all four corners, saving a minimal amount of bandwidth.

sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. Here is the entire process:

1. A normal (X)HTML page is loaded into the browser.
2. A javascript function is run which first checks that Flash is installed and then looks for whatever tags, ids, or classes you designate.
3. If Flash isn’t installed (or obviously if javascript is turned off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal and nothing further occurs. If Flash is installed, javascript traverses through the source of your page measuring each element you’ve designated as something you’d like “sIFRed".
4. Once measured, the script creates Flash movies of the same dimensions and overlays them on top of the original elements, pumping the original browser text in as a Flash variable.
5. Actionscript inside of each Flash file then draws that text in your chosen typeface at a 6 point size and scales it up until it fits snugly inside the Flash movie.

This all happens in a split-second, so all of the checking, replacing, and scaling is not visible to the user. It is not uncommon to notice a very short delay as the Flash loads, but to the user, none of the internals of this process are exposed.

2006 was rich on creative, beautiful and unusual design concepts. We’ve seen a lot of whitespace, many examples of readable and usable text-design, badges, stars, rounded corners, shapes, gradients, mirror and 3D-effects - just name it. Let’s take a close look at some of the most beautiful designs we’ve seen in 2006. Some gorgeous designs are missing? Let us know - comment on this article!

A List Apart publishes articles written for working web professionals, but we appreciate the predicament of new web designers and builders who aren’t sure where to begin. As we promised in our primer for readers new to ALA, we’ve collected a set of starting points for the next generation of people who make websites

Dynamic Drive CSS Layouts

This is Dynamic Drive’s new CSS layouts section. Here you’ll find tableless, CSS based page templates to quickly define the skeleton of your pages. Please help us spread the word by giving it a digg (see right)!

Box Model, floats, margin collapsing, margin doubling and MSIE5 Win shrink wrapping…

Box Model
Just in case you’re wondering what the hack is wrong with the Box Model, let me remind you that IE5 Win does not apply borders and padding the way other browsers do. A “good” browser adds border and padding to the width/height of the box while IE5 Win - a bad browser - does exactly the opposite; it subtracts border and padding values from the box itself. And this is ugly.

Who is this for?

If you’ve been creating sites with CSS for a while you may be getting frustrated with having to recreate and retest basic layouts on a regular basis. In this article I’m trying to illustrate a simple way of skipping the tedious startup on your average project, letting you get to the interesting stuff as quickly and efficiently as possible. I’ve not attempted to explain the layouts included here so it may not be suitable if you’re a CSS beginner. Sorry about that… Feel free to dissect them yourself if you’re interested; I’ve kept them as simple as possible.