Category: CSS

Although IE only styled scroll bars can look ‘pretty’, I’ve lost patience with them because they are a proprietary, non-web standard addition which needs to be dodged round to ensure W3C CSS validation. And since IE only has 87% or thereabouts of the browser market these days and coloured scroll bars only work in DTD Quirks mode … why bother.

Here’s how I include them when desired, in a way that permits validation. Firstly, use a free visual scroll bar styling program like this online tool or this one and obtain the scroll bar css. Then convert it to javascript (HTML Kit has a nifty plugin that does it with a click of a button), save it with a .js file extension and link it in the head of your markup document/s.

<script language="JavaScript" xsrc="js/css.js" mce_src="js/css.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Another place for great CSS styling and optimisation tips at Real World Style. This site also has useful 2 and 3 column CSS styling tutorials.

As well as through the font checking utilities on this site, the perennial problem of font sizing methods acceptable for all browsers is discussed by Owen Briggs at his site. He supplies some handy cross-browser comparison screen shots.

Owen leans towards using percentages due to their compatability. I’ve recently started setting html {font-size:100%} then body {font-size:90%} and em units throughout the rest of the style sheet. Wondering whether it may be best to go back to using percentages only as it doesn’t seem to make much difference as long as the base font is set at 100%.