The W3C recommends that visual user agents render quotation marks according to the specified language attribute, since many languages adopt different styles for quotations. Yet no user agent I have tried will render quotations in a language-specific manner in their default style sheet. Let’s change that.

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Tripoli is a generic CSS standard for HTML rendering. By resetting and rebuilding browser standards, Tripoli forms a stable, cross-browser rendering foundation for your web projects.

Enter Tripoli

The ideas behind Tripoli

• to form a generic standard for rendering HTML 4 tags
• to reset and rebuild all browser defaults for maximum compability
• to address deprecated tags in HTML 4 and disable them through CSS
• to separate content typography from layout measurements, allowing simple implementation in dynamic design environments
• to increase readability and web typography
• to assist clients who have little knowledge about CSS to write HTML that actually looks great
• to increase form useability and visual appearance of form controls
• to make the HTML look great in several medias, including screens, mobile browsers and prints
• to embrace W3C’s guidelines and well know typographic rules
• to allow external plugs that can extend generic defaults into more advanced themes

Please visit the Tripoli site for more information, downloads and examples.

RGB can be a real pain to work with. It’s hardware-oriented, non-intuitive and even after 10 years of coding RGB combinations for the web, I still can’t get the colors right without an external reference application. If a client calls and tells me he prefers the blue color to be “slightly less saturated” or “just a bit darker”, I always open up photoshop, type in my previous hex value, drag the pointer to a new color that fits, copy the new hex value I get and finally insert it into my style sheet. Coding colors by hand shouldn’t be that hard. Fortunately, CSS3 offers support for the HSL color space that is much easier to work with as a human.

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If you (like me) are using helvetica or times as preferred font-family in your web designs, you should be aware of one important thing: Firefox/mac renders the fonts incorrectly.

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I have updated the script at the popular article Scalable CSS Buttons Using PNG and Background Colors. Several people have claimed that the form in the demo doesn’t submit and it’s a “bug”. Just to clear my throat first: the article is about presentation, not behaviour. I use javascript to add presentational objects to the buttons that I can control through CSS, but I did not provide any form functionality in the example, since you probably would want to add your own anyway.

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