Hi, I’m Brian Dys — a photographer from the inside looking out · a composer entangled in electronic music · a UX designer · a spouse, a parent, & everything in between.
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Previously, I’ve discussed a class naming convention in the form of:
<generic>__<identifier>–<specific>In this manner we are using a UI State class located up in the DOM tree – particularly in the body to manipulate different UI elements under it.
Take this as an example: in a site’s header, both the main navigation and search form are located.
<header>
<h2 class="accessible-name">Header Content</h2>
<nav class="main-navigation">…</nav>
<form class="search-form">…</form>
</header>How would you be able to affect the main navigation depending on the state of the search form if its class is only confined within its container? The answer might be “thru JavaScript” – undeniably, we would need JS in this topic but only for manipulating class names. The trick lies in putting the UI Type or UI State class in a place wherein both main navigation and search form are under it.
Why <body>?
What benefit do we get in having a global class located higher in the DOM tree? It lets us control different parts of the UI depending on the site’s or app’s UI Type or UI State.
It is important to reserve the highest element you can put a class on – which is html (for pertinent class names), thus, the second highest element we could attach a class attribute to is body.
Going back to our example, we would use the following UI State class to define the state of the search form:
<body class="ui-state__search-form–active">The body class, in words, translates to “The UI State of the Search Form is Active”.
Now, whenever the search form is active, you can already manipulate the main navigation based on that state.
Take a look at the demo on CodePen:
See the Pen Using <body> to Define UI States and Types by Brian Dys Sahagun (@briandys) on CodePen.
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During the heyday of IE6, frontend design was in murky waters. The frontend designer would need to employ lots of hacks, patches, and workarounds just to achieve the look and feel of a grand mock-up. Remember:
- when we used
tablefor layout? - when we used a 1×1 transparent pixel as spacer image?
- when we exported images as masks to make rounded rectangles?
- when we used images as gradients?
These were just a minute part of the painful challenges frontend designers faced yet nothing stopped us from adapting to the crappy non-standard browsers of that time. We moulded the web into different appearances despite the difficulties. Remember the time:
- when pixel fonts were in?
- when DHTML was so fancy that sites had snowflakes falling on them and cursors were customized with trailing stars?
- of “Web 2.0” – the proliferation of badges, loading icons, fab aqua buttons?
- of letterpress typography?
- of minimalism?
- when full-screen images is the template of all websites?
Categories
- Information (HTML)
- Information Architecture
- Semantics
- Content Structure
- Interaction
- Presentation (CSS)
- Visual Design
- Interactivity (JS)
- Interactivity
- Animation
References
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There’s an update to this entry:
Elements of CSS V2
—
- Nature
- Inherent characteristics of an element (display)
- Layout
- Positioning (float, position)
- Dimension (padding, width, height)
- Spacing (margin)
- Theme
- Colors (color, background-color)
- Typography (font-size, font-family)
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In this basic HTML and CSS tutorial, we are going to demonstrate the following:
- the separation of HTML (content structure) and CSS (visual design)
- how to position a secondary element (like a graphic element or a label) thru CSS
position: absoluteandpadding
And some disclaimers:
- while it discusses semantics, it does not tackle accessibility attributes (say, ARIA)
- it does not show any SEO / screenreader test results regarding the benefits of an HTML markup with intentions on content structure or semantic HTML markup
- it only translates into HTML and CSS a specific component (from a much complicated whole), although the HTML and CSS process remains the same if applied to a whole
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Your content will flow through various containers (called regions) which you specify.
The CSS regions module allows content to flow across multiple areas called regions. The regions are not necessarily contiguous in the document order. The CSS regions module provides an advanced content flow mechanism, which can be combined with positioning schemes as defined by other CSS modules such as the Multi-Column Module [CSS3COL] or the Grid Layout Module [CSS3-GRID-LAYOUT] to position the regions where content flows.
Imagine a magazine layout where you could have multiple columns in your article or where the cut of a paragraph continues to the next page.
With all these CSS developments going on, one could really build a web app based on HTML and CSS as its front-end.
We’re really in the 21st century.
Also, checkout Adobe & HTML’s page on CSS Regions.