Helo Sleeping
I caught our kitty, Helo, on camera the other day – all stretched out.
I posted it up on icanhascheezburger’s website here.
sIFR to @font-face Site Conversion
Recently, I was browsing CSS Beauty and noticed quite a few articles on the CSS3 @font-face rule. I have always been somewhat unhappy with sIFR – I just don’t like having Flash files as header text. However, after reading more about the @font-face rule, I found out that it may be a suitable substitute for my special headline fonts – it’s also mostly cross-browser compliant (and Google Chrome will be adding support in the next version). So, I decided to change my sIFR font headings to use the @font-face rule and my process is detailed below.
The first obstacle that I encountered during this process was obtaining a font that allowed for distribution (this is a tough issue since many fonts that you normally use on a site have a different license that does not allow for distribution). So, I was going to have to replace my Century Gothic font and, after some searching on the internet, I found the Liberation Sans font by Red Hat to be acceptable.
Extending CSS Spriting
CSS Spriting is a technique for speeding up the load times for your website by reducing the number of HTTP requests for images to the server. On Yahoo’s best practices website, they say:
“CSS Sprites are the preferred method for reducing the number of image requests. Combine your background images into a single image and use the CSS background-image and background-position properties to display the desired image segment.”
This technique can be extended for non-background images on your site as well. However, some issues arise when you use CSS spriting for your main navigation elements(among other images):
- You can’t attach alternate text to divs for accessibility purposes
- CSS Spriting and the IE6 PNG fix are incompatible
- The images will not print out on printouts unless the client option to print background images is selected (this is bad for logos and menus, etc)
- For images in pages (that are not actually background images), it seems semantically bad to hide the image in CSS.
With these concerns in mind, I devised a cross-browser compliant solution that addresses all of the aforementioned problems. The new technique uses an image tag, a div, and the CSS clip property.
