A new site of mine Storm Trumpets is receiving some attention for the expanding / collapsing site menu. Visit the site and click on the menu items “Trumpets” and “Trombones” to see the menu in action. It creates the illusion of movement as if driven by DHTML or JavaScript, however to the contrary it works in CSS and is really quite simple. I have been asked to explain how it works, so thought I would provide a brief tutorial for it here.
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Today I happened onto Stu Nicholls’ CSS Playground. I found the site interesting in design, for example the hover over links on the main page shows a flashing brown bar. Is it over the top or interesting? I found some of his general menu structure hard to understand at first without playing, for example his speech bubble that is his comment link.

I like the negative image of the lady that appears … but where are the positives? Not sure what the relevance of the picture is other than it is interesting. I like the color blocks that come on for hovers as well.

I also like some of his menu examples.

Stick around htmlfixit for any length of time, and you’ll soon find we like and endorse web standards around here. Yet, that’s such an ambiguous statement to make, as many people, including web designers, are still in the dark as to what standards are and why they matter.
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I’m always on the lookout for new ways to tweak CSS for design purposes. The more you can rely on CSS to drive layout, versus images, tables, etc. the faster your site is going to load and the more you’ll distinguish your site from others.

Mandarin Design is one such site that is pushing the CSS envelope. An exploration of their site reveals a whole shebang of excellent tips, tricks, design ideas and style guidelines. I haven’t come close to checking everything out, but here are a couple of notable articles:

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Well today I was working on a css rollover menu with Franki. We as usual got off topic and were comparing WeetBix to Frosted Mini Wheats. In looking at the Mini-Wheats site they had drop down menus with little bullets (more…)

This article is a must read! This guy Mike Davidson just participated in a major redesign of the ABC News Site. The breadth and wisdom is so significant that I have included this post in six of my blog categories (general, web design, css, html, news, rss).

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CSS on the fly at this site. You can try various layouts via drop down and radio buttons and the css is generated for you.