Forget About Photoshop: 5 More Ways to Stop Using Images in Your Designs | Hacker News Reader

Forget About Photoshop: 5 More Ways to Stop Using Images in Your Designs

cherrysave.com

Amusing: the fact that the author uses images to demonstrate the intended results of each example.

Less amusing: after bemoaning the "(awful) state of standards-compliant browsers," 3 out of the 5 tips rely on proprietary/non-standard css. See related article, "5 More Ways to Break Your Site"

I wouldn't use any of these on a production site.

I have to admit that there are some nice CSS hacks there like the gradient and drop shadow effects but it's dependent on proprietary CSS which should be avoided if possible. If you start to rely on proprietary CSS then you are setting yourself up for problems. Isn't this part of the reason why we hate IE because we are forced to use CSS code like this?

I have to think that all these effects will eventually be incorporated into the CSS standard but until then you can achieve all of those effects with small image files and simple CSS.

First: it's not "propriertary CSS" it is called "vendor extensions" and are allowed in CSS.

Second, and more important:

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-background/

http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-images/#gradients-

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-2d-transforms/

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-3d-transforms/

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-transitions/

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-animations/

Third: IE is pretty much the only browser showing now signs of support for some of the above.

Good CSS 3 links and I have to assume that the Webkit and Gecko based browsers will follow suit eventually.

In regards to proprietary vs vendor extensions terminology. I would agree that "vendor extensions" would be the official name for them but I used proprietary as an adjective to describe the type of CSS that it is. If it's not an open standard and if it's closed to a certain platform isn't that proprietary?

I'm also not saying that you shouldn't use them, it's based on the interface you are trying to implement and your coding preferences. All, I was trying to say that I would prefer to use images and standard CSS before I would consider using a vendor extension.

No, we (at least I) don't hate IE because it has proprietary extensions. I prefer standards to be made of things that have been done successfully first (usually as proprietary extensions). You can see by inspection which parts aren't standard, so it's nice and clean. If you aren't on IE, just ignore them.

No, I hate IE because so often when it implements standards, it implements them wrong. There's no clean way around that!

I found that the only times when I had to use a proprietary extension in order to make a page work the same in all browsers was because of IE, and that was probably because it implemented the standards wrong.

Regardless of how well these tricks work, I'm all for reducing the number of image dependencies in my sites. I like to make use of widgets like YUI buttons ( http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/button/ ) as much as possible so that I don't have to ask a designer to re-recreate button images for me, or shill out money for Photoshop / Illustrator.

Ooooh sideways text! My readers are going to LOVE that.

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