[css-d] Short CSS course - what should I teach?

[Paul Vaughan]

Hi all.

I am creating a course on how to design web sites using CSS.  (That's a
very loose title: it could easily be How to make your website
better... etc.)  It will be a 3-hour short course for people with some
experience of web design, aimed at individuals and small businesses, and
does not need to go into huge amounts of detail.

I'd like everyone's input into what I should be teaching. I'll cover the
'why', so all I need is the 'what'.

My plan so far (in a nutshell):

1) Text structure, use of semantics (refer to the bare CSS Zen Garden site)
2) Typefaces/fonts (styles and relative/absolute sizes)
3) Positioning (reasonably simple: fixed to fit in 800x600 or full
screen width)
4) Images (in the design, not the content)
5) Multiple style sheets and switching between them

I don't want to get bogged down with designing for different browsers
and all the required hacks unless absolutely necessary.

I'll probably cover print media style sheets, as I believe a web page
should look good on the web as well as on paper.

Please remember this is 3 hours maximum, to people who aren't
necessarily web designers (or who may not be) and who may not have heard
of standards-compliance or Firefox/Opera/Mozilla etc, even though I will
be mentioning these a lot.  3 hours will fly by.  I realise this is a
list consisting of both the CSS elite and the noobs and everyone in
between, and I'd like opinions and ideas from all of you!

All thoughts and comments welcome.  If someone's already done this, save
me from reinventing the wheel.

Cheers all,

Paul.

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[css-d] Liquid layout or faux columns broken.

[Paul Vaughan]

(Should be: I took a great ALA tutorial and borked it, please help!)

Hi folks. I've been hiding in the shadows of this list for a long time
and have learned so much; however I am now stuck and making things worse.

I had a tables-based site, now it's css based on the 'liquid layouts
using negative margins' [0] article over at ALA [1] (great new look
there btw), but I have modified it to be 2-columns (basically I took the
last-but-one example and ran with it).

If you check my website's main page [2] you'll see the layout looks
okay, as the content is longer than the sidebar. However on another page
where the content is minimal and sidebar is longer, e.g. my pgp-key page
[3] the sidebar dies a death as, I believe, the 'faux columns' hack
isn't quite working. Now I have tinkered with the original css [4] (of
course I did, I broke it!) and I've done some site-checking (only FF and
IE Win so far) but things seem to work okay.

The XHTML validates perfectly (at least it does on those two pages, I'm
still working on it) and so does the CSS. Suggestions and pointing out
where I've made a blatant stupid mistake most welcome.

Thanks folks,

Vaughany.

[0] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/negativemargins
[1] http://www.alistapart.com/
[2] http://www.vaughany.com/index.php
[3] http://www.vaughany.com/pgp_key.php
[4] http://www.vaughany.com/style/coolmint.css

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