Tables, borders, and border-collapse

Need a table? For your table data, not for layout? (We’re clear on that issue, right?) Okay, make one. Here’s how to do the borders using CSS.

The border property is what you use to add a border to a table with CSS. You might have a rule such as this one:

table {
border: 1px solid #333;
}

That would add a one pixel, solid border in a gray color around the table. But it wouldn’t add borders to the table cells themselves. So write this rule, too.

td, th {
border: 1px solid #333;
}

Now everything has a border. In fact, there are two borders around everything, because each individual td, th, and table has its own borders.

To remove the space between these borders and make them appear as a single border line, use border-collapse. Put it in the table rule only. The possible values for border-collapse are separate, collapse, and inherit. You want them to collapse.

table {
border: 1px solid #333;
border-collapse: collapse;
}

Now you can get rid of those inline HTML attributes in your table code that set the borders and move table presentation to the CSS, where it belongs. Peace and joy will follow you where ever you go.

Useful links for today

Empty Links and Screen Readers at the Yahoo! User Interface Blog says, “The conclusion is that the most accessible link is one that contains link text. Different techniques of hiding links, from no link text, through to hiding by CSS can cause an accessibility barrier to screen reader users. Each screen reader presented its user with a different set of problems and barriers.” They go on to give individual screen reader test results.

Introducing WAVE 4.0 from WebAIM is an update the to popular WAVE accessibility testing tool. Version 4.0 is still in beta.

Our Tech President Endorsements from TechCrunch is based on TechCrunch reader polls and interviews by TechCrunch. See why they picked Obama and McCain. They have technological reservations about McCain. This was all decided before the Republicans announced that they were technologically the coolest because of upstream.tv covering the Republican National Convention. Does this help McCain in TechCrunch’s eyes?

$10K bounty for Blogger’s Identity suggests a new job niche. Internet ID bounty hunter!

Courseware

I got a question from a reader a while back about courseware. Simultaneously, there’s been chatter about courseware on one of the listservs I follow. A few ideas got tossed out. I’m just listing them here. If you need courseware, you may find something helpful in the list. I haven’t personally used any material from these places, but I’d love to see (or hear more about) what you think of it if you’ve tried it.

Related Posts: Review: Textbooks from Thomson Learning

Useful links for month’s end

Testing for Accessibility – CalWAC 2008 is Jim Thatcher’s presentation and includes the slides and all sorts of accessibility testing resources. Organized in Thatcher’s customary clear and easy style, and full of goodies.

Compatbility and IE at Laura Carlson’s Web Design References will keep you on top of theĀ  list of posts and articles discussing the raging question around Microsoft introducing a meta tag that would look for a specific IE 8 rendering mode. At last count, she had 23 links already, but I don’t see Burningbird’s Tyranny of Microsoft among them yet. It’s a firestorm out there!

Education 2.0: Top Online Learning Resources should be of interest to educators and students. From Wired Magazine.

Exposed

Are you aware that Americans are regularly exposed to toxic chemicals in electronic waste, cosmetics, plastics, toys, foods, and other places? These toxic chemicals show up in our blood and the blood of even our youngest children. Did you know that these toxic chemicals can be removed from most of the products mentioned above, and have been removed with no economic consequences for all the consumers in the European Union (EU), about 500,000,000 people?

Read the entire article at BlogHer.

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Summary of eHow articles for January

State Fair Sights Cowpokes

Two young cowpokes at the State Fair last summer caught my eye. At eHow, I’m still working through the various free web design tools and writing how-tos for them. And Tribbit is really cool if you’ve never heard of it. Here’s what I wrote in January.

Adobe Flex 3 pre release event

Adobe PresentationKevin Hoyt from Adobe spoke to the NM Adobe Users Group yesterday with a pre-release presentation about Flex 3. (He declined to give an exact release date, but it won’t be long.) He also talked about AIR a bit.

He showed off the new features of Flex 3, naturally. Some of the more impressive have to do with custom data rendering and really cool things that can be done with charts using data sets.

He also pointed out that people who have CS 3 software can export documents from Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, and Illustrator as Flex files or as AIR files.

In this photo, Kevin is talking in front of the Flex 3 workspace and explaining the graphics you see that he made in about 30 seconds.

Flex 3 workspace

AIR was interesting. It’s an open source freebie and can be created without any Adobe software. AIR is used for is to take web developer skills such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Flash and use them to create desktop applications. Of course, Adobe wants you to do that using the tools in Flex, and Kevin showed a slick eBay desktop app that was created just that way. You can drag and drop files from your computer into this eBay desktop app, then upload it after you’re through working. Sure sounds easier than trying to create a product page using eBay’s online tools.

As always at NMAUG meetings, there was great schwag, including a full Creative Suite CS 3 and an IOU for the professional version of Flex 3 when it releases. There were books, tee shirts and all sorts of other gifts.

Kevin and Elaine give away a ton of stuff There are more photos at Flickr from the event. The event took place in the ARTS Lab at UNM, a room where they film using green screens and the lighting was interesting. I took some shots using the “twilight” setting on my camera of NMAUG’s Elaine and Becky that turned out really interesting.

Related Posts: An Interview with New Mexico’s Dynamic Duo

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