Jon Skypes wrote up a CSS performance test across browsers comparing CSS styling by no styling, by tag, by class, by descender, and by child.  While for most cases everything seems pretty close as far as Safari and Firefox goes and of course IE is a whole lot slower.  In real world applications you would never really have that many styles in your style sheet so in most cases I don’t think you would see a difference in speed.  It is interesting to note as these web applications become more and more complex this may be an issue.  As of right now I think we’re pretty far off before we need to worry about it.

Noupe had a recent post some websites you shouldn’t have missed in May 2008.  It’s a list of 54 things to review covering a range of design, coding, to just some good resources to bookmark and keep for future reference.  I’m going to go through and give my top 10 from the list.

1. Pastel color menu with dynamic submenu using CSS – While I haven’t necessarily made pastel color menus, I have used this technique many times to create menus and submenus using list elements.  It keeps the code pretty clean and of course you need to have the small piece of JavaScript to support browsers like IE6.  One thing to be aware of is if you have a large elaborate menu scheme, this creates a lot of HTML in the header of your page.  If you are supporting JavaScript it might be a good idea to AJAX the appropriate data when the user takes action.
2. Yahoo! Design Pattern Library – I’ve been posting a lot about Yahoo.  I’ve just been really happy with the work they’ve produced over the last year.  This is a very good reference piece if you are wondering how something should be implemented or if you have a client that insists on one thing, you can show them that it’s been tested and proven to be best this way.
3. Which CSS Grid Framework Should You Use for Web Design? – I’ve been using a few of the Grids frameworks listed in this article, mostly the YUI Grids CSS for my work.  For the most part it gets the majority of what I want to do done faster and I feel like I’m a step ahead when I’m creating a site.  Good clean CSS is what we strive to create and these libraries make it easier for us to do that.
4. Applying Divine Proportion To Your Web Designs – While I don’t do too much design work personally, there are times when I do and I think that’s one area in my work that I can learn more and improve.  It’s always been pretty difficult for me to design things.  I guess I just don’t have enough creativity.  This article describes the rule of thirds when designing and this fits in well if you are using a Grids library.  You can work together with your front end developers and designers to create great looking layouts and save some time in the process.
5. Free 278 Page PDF eBook- The Photoshop Anthology – I haven’t read the entire book yet, but it looks like a good read.  There’s only a limited amount of time left if you want to sign up and download.
6. Find Similar Users on del.icio.us – I’ve really gotten into del.icio.us lately and I think it’s kind of cool to see who has similar interests as you.  I’m not one of those social network stalkers though.
7. 45+ Free Premium WordPress Themes with Magazine or Grid Layouts – There are some great looking designs in this collection.  Just glancing over them has given me some inspiration on some future projects.
8. 36 Cool Business Cards You Should’ve Seen – I’ve been looking for some new business cards since I formed the LLC.  I’ll have to take some more time to come up with something cool.
9. 30 Websites to follow if you’re into Web Development – I saw this posted in Digg the other day.  I saved it to my bookmarks.  It’s a great resource for web development.
10. SEO Guide for Designers – While I don’t like to take on too many SEO projects anymore, this is a good resource for best practices.  I don’t like taking the projects on because there are no guarantees in that market and if someone says they can guarantee something they probably aren’t doing it white hat style.

So that’s my top 10 from Noupe’s post.  If you have any questions for me or any comments about the resource, let me know.

While I like to keep the software installs on my machines pretty vanilla, if there is a tool that helps my productivity I’m all for checking it out.  While I’ve moved primarily to WebKit for web development, I often find myself using Firefox as well.  I keep my Firefox install to the base plus three extensions.

Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. Firebug tends to be used the most by us. I can easily inspect the DOM and edit CSS inline. Those are key features for us. Also it immediately tells any JavaScript errors in the code. Another nice feature is you can print things out in the console. This helps quite a bit in debugging.
Web Developer Toolbar

Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Sometimes Firebug isn’t able to inspect the DOM so being able to view the generated source is nice. Also you are able to disable certain aspects of the page such as JavaScript or CSS or outline certain elements as well. It has a built in validator for checking your code.
YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a nice extension to Firebug. Yahoo did a nice job of collecting some tips for improving the speed of a website. While in some sites, I can’t always get an A rating I try to make sure if there is anything I can do, that I at least make an attempt to do it.
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We’ve been using the YUI CSS framework for a lot of our recent work including this site as well.  The YUI CSS framework is broken down by Yahoo in four different sections Reset, Base, Fonts, and Grids.  The four sections are available in a number of different formats as either files for each section or a single file with minified versions as well.  For final production we use the minified version that includes Reset, Fonts, and Grids and it’s been recommended to use this file because it’s in it’s smallest possible form and it is available through a permalink from Yahoo.

I had looked at Google blueprintcss for a while as well as YUI CSS and both had it’s pros and cons, but continued to use my own base files that I had been used to working with for quite a long time.  So what actually switched me over to YUI CSS?  I’ve been contracting through SolutionSet for a couple of years now and Nate Koechley from Yahoo came in gave a presentation about YUI CSS and just YUI in general.  It got me thinking that this was a good idea, but was it going to replace my everyday use case files.  It wasn’t convinced until I watched Nate’s video in YUI Theater.

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