Isaac Keyet

Part 2 out of 2 (Part 1)

The only time a web designer notices the Outline property is when you want to disable it, and you’re wondering how to do so or if it’s even possible. But you can actually use the property to do very clever things.

At a first glance, the Border and the Outline property look very much alike. They share the same rule structure, and they both put a border around any object you want. But there are two fundamental differences.

1. When the browser calculates the width of a floated object, it takes into account Width, Padding and Border.

Notice how setting a border adds to the total width, while the outline doesn’t.

2. Since borders take up space, you can have problem aligning elements on a webpage using borders. However if you use an outline instead, the “border” will just be a layer on top of the image and won’t push your element anywhere. Notice how the second image’s inside border still lines up with the text.

This is very useful for registration processes, if you want to show a field that needs to be corrected: Instead of applying a border and having the textfield move X amount of pixels horizontally you can apply an outline!

How to use Outline, examples

Example:
.classNameHere {
outline: 1px solid #000000;
}
Example 2:
.classNameHere {
outline: 2px dotted #FF66CC;
}

I hope you enjoyed this little introduction to the Outline CSS property!

Recently I faced the problem of either creating my own 16 square pixel icons, or use others. I started looking into how other services have solved the problem, and I realized after looking at Socialthing! that the best solution is also the most obvious and simple one: Just import the site’s own favicons!

Here are some examples of great 16×16 icons from well known sites:

• Facebook:
• Last.fm:
• CNN:
• Yahoo!:
• Twitter:

Almost all bigger sites out there have a favicon, so to find and download an icon just do the following:

1. Enter root web adress in your browsers adress field: http://www.sitename.com
2. Apply /favicon.ico to the adress, like so: http://www.sitename.com/favicon.ico
3. Hit Enter to go to the adress, and there you are. This is the perfect 16px icon for the website you’ve entered!

I don’t know if this is common knowledge among webdesigners, but this was all new for me. If you don’t select a color for a border, just say “border: 1px solid;” (for example) it will inherit the color of the current object. I’ve checked this in Firefox 2 and Opera 9, and it really works here.

Very interesting, at least I think so..

I’m not very experienced in Flash. I can do basic movies with tweens, some playback buttons and maybe one or two animations, but that’s pretty much it. For a recent project however, I had to do a pause button.

Now this might seem like an easy task, but it isnt. A pause button must both pause and play the video. I looked around the web for some easy solutions, but couldn’t come up with anything useful (although I’m sure there are guides for it out there, I just didn’t look hard enough..). This is what I came up with:

TO CREATE A PLAY/PAUSE BUTTON
1. Create a movieclip called “playpause”. Put this movieclip anywhere in your main movie.
2. Create a button in this movieclips first frame, call this button “pause”.
3. Now go to frame two, create a keyframe and another button, call this one “play”.
4. Create another layer, call this layer “script”. Put the marker in the first frame and open Frame Actions. Type in “stop();”. Create another keyframe, and do the same thing again.
5. The buttons need some actionscripting too to be able to work. They need to both make the other button display and to play and pause our movie, which is the main target. I found a way to do this really easily. Click the button “pause”, and open Button Actions. Then type in:

on (release) {
gotoAndStop(2);
_parent.stop();
}

The first line displays the play button, the other one pauses the main movie. Select the other button, “play”, and type in:

on (release) {
gotoAndStop(1);
_parent.play();
}

Save the document, press Command+Enter (PC: CTRL+Enter) and make sure it works.