Multi-column lists: can’t live with ’em, can’t achieve perfect bliss without ’em. Paul Novitski offers a staggering six possible methods for accomplishing this commonly requested layout trick. Examine your options and choose wisely.
Topic: Layout & Grids
ALA’s New Print Styles
Print away, you fiends! Eric Meyer presents the ALA 4.0 print styles and discusses the challenge of translating a complex screen layout into a well-designed and useful printed page.
Hybrid CSS Dropdowns
Yup. It’s yet another CSS dropdown article — but one that resolves many problems associated with common dropdown methods and degrades beautifully. Hybrid CSS dropdowns allow access to all pages, keep the user aware of where she is within the site, and are clean and light to boot. It’s a tasty little vitamin pill, so quit sighing and try it.
Spruced-Up Site Maps
The clean-n-simple site map gets a nice haircut and and a shoe-shine as Kim Siever shows us how to hook custom bullet styles to troublesome nested lists.
Bulleted Lists: Multi-Layered Fudge
A passion for web standards can become a broken heart when effects that are easy to achieve with table layouts seem to defy the earnest CSS- and markup-conscious designer. Fortunately, new ALA author Nandini Doreswamy loves a challenge. Here she shows how to create two columns of bulleted lists in the flow of text.
Big, Stark & Chunky
You’ve designed for the screen and made provision for blind, handheld, and PDA browser users. But what about low-vision people? Powered by CSS, “zoom” layouts convert wide, multicolumn web pages into low-vision-friendly, single column designs. Accessibility maven Joe Clark explores the rationale and methods behind zoom layouts. Board the zoom train now!
Cross-Column Pull-Out Part Two: Custom Silhouettes
The cross-column pull-out gave us a new technique for marking up a layout with a pull-out positioned between columns. Now we examine a variation of the technique for wrapping around the edges of a non-rectangular image positioned between columns.
Cross-Column Pull-Outs
Print designers like to wrap text around images that sit between columns. Now you can, too. Daniel Frommelt takes us where no web layout has gone before.
Pocket-Sized Design: Taking Your Website to the Small Screen
Among the many websites that are out there, few are standards-compliant. Among those few, only a handful sport style sheets adjusted to the needs of handheld devices. Of those which do offer styling for handhelds, not all will fit the smallest, lowest-resolution screens without presenting the user with the ultimate handheld horror: namely, horizontal scrolling. This article presents a set of general suggestions for creating a handheld-friendly style sheet that works well even on handheld screens no wider than 120px.
Drop-Down Menus, Horizontal Style
Multi-tiered drop-down menus can be a hassle to build and maintain — especially when they rely on big, honking chunks of JavaScript. Nick Rigby presents a way to handle this common navigation element with a cleanly structured XHTML list, straightforward CSS, and only a few concessions to browser quirks.
