A quick post about web development, especially across browsers and OS. There are to sets of tools that can save you a lot of headaches when doing CSS development.
The first one is the CSS tools from Yahoo! UI Library, namely Reset CSS to reset base CSS style differences across browser, Base CSS to then restore every styles to sensible defaults, Fonts CSS to have base fonts that don't suck (with a cheat sheet for font size and family adjustment that works even with font zooming), and finally Grids CSS for basic grid layouts that "just work" and don't break.
And as a quick note, as part of YUI they have released the YUI Compressor, a Java command-line tool that has both a JavaScript compressor/obsfucator and a CSS compressor (open source, BSD-style).
The second one is weirder. It's ie7-js, a set of JavaScripts that makes Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 and higher behave more standard-compliant, fixing semi-transparent PNGs in IE 5.5 and IE 6 along the way. It works pretty well (for "beta" JavaScript hacks), and it's a ton better than always having to tweak your code with workarounds for only IE.
Published on March 5, 2008 at 16:28 EST
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