HTML and CSS

What is the difference between target=_blank and target=blank? It’s a question that seems to crop up every now and then. At first, they both appear to do the same thing, open a link in a new tab (or window). However, omitting that little underscore makes an important difference.

A look at how to improve performance and prevent requests for hidden images on mobile. The approach discussed uses just HTML and CSS, so no JavaScript. This is a blog post I wrote for Evoluted New Media (where I work in Sheffield).

Sass maps have been around for a little over a year now and are an incredibly useful feature of the CSS preprocessor.

If you’re already using them then you’ll already know how handy they are; if not, then hopefully this little post will give you a good start.

Nice little approach to writing OOCSS using BEM in Sass.

I’ve written an introduction to inuit.css — the object oriented CSS framework from CSS guru Harry Roberts — over on Think Tank.

inuit.css is an Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS) framework that uses Sass and a BEM-style naming convention. It comes with a powerful library of objects and abstractions that you can opt-in to (so there’s little CSS bloat from unwanted objects).

In the article I go through what OOCSS and BEM are, as well as how to install and get started with the inuit.css framework. It’s the same framework I used to build this site and am in the process of using for my next personal project. If you’ve not taken a look at it yet I’d recommend you do, it does some really neat things that makes styling up a site easy.

Neat approach to intelligently handling CSS z-indexes using a CSS preprocessor. The suggestion of using a Sass map is particularly good.

Sass 3.3 was released the other day and came with loads of new features. This is a good look at the main ones including map data structures and source maps.

As someone who also switched from LESS to Sass, this is a pretty good article on why Sass is the better CSS pre-processor. It’s worth a read even if you’re currently using Sass, but perhaps not fully making the most of what it can do. There’s some good examples of some advanced functionality.

When you’re setting the font sizes in your stylesheets which CSS measurement do you use and is it restricting the usability of your site?