CSS pointers and a starting place

Posted: February 14th, 2006 | Author: Michael R. Murphy | Filed under: XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

Whenever I begin work on a new project,I have three files that I always turn to: an XHTML document,a CSS file,and a Javascript file. The XHTML document is a blank canvas but the important part is that it contains a valid doctype declaration and links to the CSS and Javascript files.

Relatively recent articles by Mike Stenhouse at Content with Style and Faruk Ate? at KuraFire Network discussed and published their CSS “starter” files so I figured why shouldn’t I do the same? My CSS file actually comes from Faruk’s orginal (mentioned here) but now updated with the improvements he mentions in his most current post. You can download my template site which includes a valid XHTML “starter”,CSS,and Javascript files.

Update: A while back I added the line-height property to my CSS declarations after reading somewhere that giving elements a line-height slightly larger than the text size gave text more breathing room. I can confirm that this produces more legible,more professional looking copy. I read recently however on Eric Meyer’s site that I hadn’t been implementing this in the best fashion. I’d been specifying line-height in terms of ems which computes line-height based on the font-size of the element. This is fine and dandy for the element itself but any descendants inherit the computed line-height of the element rather than calculating their own. It appears that the best manner is to specify a unitless line-height which passes the number on to descendants as a sort of multiplier from which each descendant calculates its own line-height. So,my base CSS file has been updated to use a unitless line-height declaration.

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