Justin Paul Silva

Web design, development, & more

Styling the HTML Tag

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Apparently, it’s possible to apply a CSS background both the body tag AND the html tag in order to create some interesting layering effects. And it works in Firefox, Chrome and IE 6-8. Probably more, but that’s All I’ve tested it in. Why would you want to do this? I’ll show you three examples where this can come in handy. Use the html tag for a repeating page background and the body tag for a top-only background, such as a gradient Use it with the body-width techn ... read on

A Graveyard Song

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Musician Tristan Omand selected my “Capo Vendetto” piece for the cover of his new EP “A Graveyard Song.” The album will be available on iTunes on November 19th. Until then, you can listen to and download the title track for free. ... read on

CSS Scrolling Animation

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While redesigning this site, I tried implementing many different background effects to grab users’ attention. Although I decided against using the following effect, perhaps you can make better use of it. This is a demonstration of how to use two images and some simple CSS to animate the background of your site while the user scrolls up and down the page. Here is a demonstration of the effect using three mask possibilities. This technique follows Rufus Butler Seder’s Scanimation tec ... read on

Specifying Tab Stop Width

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I recently scoured the internet, looking for a way to specify the width of a tab stop (\t) in CSS. It turns out that CSS doesn’t offer any sort of solution. You may be asking, “Why would you even want to do that? After all, browsers ignore whitespace in HTML.” That’s true, unless of course you’re using a pre tag or any other tag with the whitespace set to pre in CSS, like the code examples on this site. What we’ll do is use Javascript to search the element fo ... read on

Clean URLs Part 2

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My previous article, Clean URLs with htaccess shows a very basic way of going about cleaning up your URLs. Now, let’s assume that not all of your pages are meant to look or act the same. How can we use different keywords, title, and description on each page? How can we use different Javascript or CSS files on different pages? How can we use add different header content for one or more pages? clean.php This is what a typical PHP file will look like. We will store the title, keywords, etc ... read on