In one of the previous articles, you have been introduced to basic CSS selectors, class, element and id selectors. You can execute a lot of CSS works with those but they are not the only selectors. There are other selectors that allow you to select elements and style based on more specific rules:

Universal Selectors: These selectors can be used in selecting every element on the page.

Child Selectors: These selectors can be used when you want to select specific elements that are descendants of any other specific elements.

Descendant Selectors: These selectors can be used if you want to select particular elements that are descendants of other specific elements. The elements here are not just limited to direct children but those which are further down the tree as well.

Adjacent Sibling Selectors: To select those elements that follow other specific elements, these selectors are used.

Pseudo-Classes: These comes in handy when you want to style elements not just based on what the elements are but on more esoteric factors such as the stats of links. i.e. you can style the elements depending on deeper factors like being hovered over or link already visited.

Pseudo-Elements: These elements allow styling of specific parts of elements. As for instance, the initial letter of that element. These elements also allow inserting of content before or after specific elements.

As you progress, you will be guided through more complicated selectors. Even though you don’t know anything by now, you don’t have to worry because you will get to know them as you gain more experience in designing and styling web pages. Start off with the three basic selectors and then move on as you gain experience and confidence.

Lets deal a little bit more about the selectors mentioned above.

Universal Selectors

These selectors select every element on a page and apply the styling properties. As for instance, the following rule says that every element on the page will be given a solid 1 pixel black border

* {

border: 1px solid #000000;

}

Attribute Selectors

These selectors allow selecting elements based on attributes they contain. For example, the following selector shows that you can select every img element with an alt attribute.

mg[alt] {

border: 1px solid #000000;

}

By using the above selector, you will be putting a black border around any image that has an alt attribute.

Selecting attributes becomes more useful if you can select them by attribute value instead of just attribute names as given in the example below:

img[src="alert.gif"] {

border: 1px solid #000000;

}

You may think that this is not very useful but it can be useful when it comes to debugging. CSS 3 now introduces three new types of attribute selector that can select based in text strings in attribute values.

Child Selectors

One can use a child selector for selecting specific elements that are children of other specific elements. As for example, the following rule will turn text of strong elements that are children of h3 elements into blue but will cause no effect on other strong elements.

h3 > strong {

color: blue;

}

(Note: Child Selectors are not supported in IE 6 and below)

Descendant Selectors

Similar to child selectors, descendant selectors however only select direct descendants. These selectors select only suitable elements from anywhere in an element hierarchy, not only direct descendants. Look at the following HTML snippet.



hello

In this paragraph I will say

goodbye.

The div element is in this snippet is the parent of all the others. It has two children, em and p. The p element has another single child element, another em.

A child selector can be used to select just the em immediately inside the div as:

div > em {

…

}

But if you use a descendent selector, as give below:

div em {

…

}

Both em elements would be selected.

Adjacent Sibling Selectors

These selectors allow the selection of specific elements that come directly after another specific element. However, the elements are of the same level in the element hierarchy. In the following rule, you will be able to select all p elements that comes immediately after h2 elements but not other p elements.

h2 + p {

…

}

(Note: Adjacent Sibling selectors are not supported in IE 6 and below)

Pseudo-Classes

These classes are used to provide styles to various states of elements. Its most common usage is in styling links states. Examples are given below:

:link – the default state of links.

:visited – links already visited in the browser.

:focus – links that currently have the keyboard cursor within them.

:hover – links that are currently being hovered over by the mouse pointer.

:active – a link that is currently being clicked on.

According to the following rule the default links will be blue. The underlining under the link will disappear when hovered over. In order to make the same effect take place when links are focused via the keyboard, :hover rule is duplicated with :focus. If a link is already visited, the color of the link will turn gray and finally, when a link is active, it is emboldened.

a:link {

color: blue;

}

a:visited {

color: gray;

}

a:hover, a:focus {

text-decoration: none;

}

a:active {

font-weight: bold;

}

Note that the above specified rules should be in the same order. It may not work otherwise. This is because specificity of a rule in a style sheet may override the earlier rules. You will come to know more about it later.

The :focus pseudo-class also comes in handy as a usability aid in forms. For instance, we can highlight the input field that has the active blinking cursor with a rule like given below:

input:focus {

border: 2px solid black;

background color: lightgray;

}

Now, let us have a look at :first-child. This pseudo-class selects any instance of the element that is first child element of its parent. As given in the example below, the rule selects the first list item in any list and makes its text bold.

li:first-child {

font-weight: bold;

}

Last but not the least, lets look at :lang pseudo-class. This class selects elements whose languages have been set to a specified language using the lang attribute. An example is given below.

A paragraph of American text, gee whiz!

Could be selected using the following:

p:lang((en-US) {

…

}

Pseudo-elements

This one has two purposes. The first purpose is:

1. To use them in selecting first letter or the first line of text inside a given element.

2. To easily create a drop cap at the start of every paragraph.

Below are given the rules as example:

p:first-letter {

font-weight: bold;

font-size: 300%

background-color: red;

}

In the above rule, the first letter of every paragraph will now emboldened, will be 300% bigger than the rest of the paragraph, and have a red background.

In order to make the first line of every paragraph bold, we can use the below given rule:

p:first-line {

font-weight: bold;

}

The second use of these elements is to generate content through Cascading Style Sheets which is more complex. We can use the :before or:after pseudo-elements to specify whether a content is to be inserted before or after the element selected. Thereafter, we decide on what is to be inserted. Here is an example of inserting images after every link on that page.

a:after {

content: ” ” url(flower.gif);

}

We can also use the attr() function to insert attribute values of the elements after the element. As for example, we can insert the target of every link in the document within brackets after them as given below:

a:after {

content: “(” attr(href) “)”;

}

Rules like the above are perfect for print style sheets. By print style sheets we meant to say those which we can be written and are automatically applied when a user prints a page.

We can also insert incremented numerical values after repeating elements (like paragraphs or bullets) using the counter() function of which will be explained later.

It is to be noted that all these selectors are not supported in IE 6 and below. Important information shouldn’t be inserted with CSS for that content will be unavailable if a user chooses not to use the style sheet. The bottom line is, CSS is for styling and HTML is for important contents.

A business plan is a document that will help you to create a successful UK home business and outline your objectives, providing you with an idea of how it will work financially.

Why you should have a plan

It is incredibly common these days for someone who is thinking of starting a new business to create a detailed plan. Often these will be needed by the bank before you can obtain a business loan if you require one. However, even if you do not require a loan or financial backing you could greatly benefit from having a plan in place.

By having a plan set out you can establish if your expectations are reasonable. It will also enable you to work out the amount of money you need to earn and how much work you will need to make the business financially viable. You can set a business plan for whatever time frame you feel necessary. If you set yourself a specific goal then you are more likely to stick to this and achieve it by having a plan in place. Often those who do not have a plan find that it is easy to lose their way.

Items to include

A good plan should include well thought out ways of meeting the goals that you have set for your business. This should mean that you have also carefully thought out the best way to achieve your goals. A business plan is after all no good if it simply consists of a list of objectives that you have no way of meeting. To have a successful business you need to plan ahead and make sure that your UK home business is viable which is why having a business plan is important. The plan will also contain well thought ideas on the best ways for you to find customers and the budget you have for marketing.

If you have no experience of creating one then you will find that there is a lot of expert help available on the internet. This will give you an idea of the things you need to include and areas that you need to focus on along with the best way to write one. Even better, if you know someone that has made a UK home business plan before then ask for their help.

I just finished reading “CSS; The Missing Manual” by David McFarland. As a new web developer just starting out I have read dozens of books on HTML and CSS and this book was one of the most informative books that I have read to date.

The book is written in a how to manual style and takes you step by step into to style sheet creation process using CSS. What I like most about the book is how simple and easy the author wrote about this very complex topic. The book is very complete and covers every aspect of CSS, from text format, to layout, and even covered print media. I also like the format where the author would introduce a new concept and discuss it and then have tutorials right after to help you fully understand the idea. I also found the use of images and diagrams very helpful and I think I would have been lost without them.

The one criticism that I have is that I think there could have been even more tutorial. I think more opportunities to practice and apply what is being learned would have made this book the best in the category. I would also suggest tying this in with a website tutorial where you can apply what you are learning directly on the Web.

In closing, I think this was a great book with a lot of useful information. I would definitely recommend it to any beginner who is looking for a starting manual on CSS.

Often people who are very good in business will have their friends come to them when they have an idea of a new company to start. Generally, we all recommend that it makes sense to prepare a business plan to help bring investors on board, or to take to the bank to borrow the money to start their company. Still, it is a lot of work to prepare a business plan, and it is even harder if the individual wanting to start the new firm doesn’t know where to start themselves.

This is why I recommend if you are doing such entrepreneurial planning that you discuss many things with the person who has the concept for the new venture, and work with them every step of the way. One way I have found to do this, is to prepare an outline prior to creating the plan, and then ask the entrepreneur:

“If you can give me a sentence or two under as many of the headings as possible, this will help speed up the process. So the plan is convincing, don’t worry we will constantly be changing it as we go, saving old drafts. It’s about “planning” not just completing it to show to your Angle or pitching to potential investors.”

Next, I explain that, “first, as I build this plan, I was hoping you might spend a couple of hours making some notes. Perhaps, print the outline I’ve prepared and think about it.”

A seasoned MBA student, small-business owner, or long-standing entrepreneur will have no problem putting together a plan if they have all the right information up front. Putting together a rough draft is not all that hard, if you have the major components in place. Once a rough draft business plan is put together, the person with the concept can then began to write in the margins, in between the double space sentences.

And if the process goes back and forth like this for three or four times, you are bound to have a solid strategy that looks and feels right, and it is ready to put to the test to secure the financial needs of the future business. Please consider all this.

Naming their new restaurant business is something most owners spend a lot of time thinking about, dreaming about and testing on friends, family and strangers. In reality, the name of the restaurant isn’t really that critical to its success, but because that is the identifier in the new owner’s mind, they give it undue importance and significance.

There aren’t really any hard and fast rules about picking a good name in terms of what name will do better than others, but there are some things to keep in mind generally about selecting a name that will be more user friendly. Don’t pick a name that is hard to spell or hard to say. Even if you are using a name for a restaurant business that may serve French food, try to not to pick a difficult to spell or pronounce French name for the restaurant. Don’t pick a name that will be easily confused with another restaurant. Aside from potential trademark issues, you just don’t want to accidentally send business to the wrong restaurant.

Don’t pick a name that might have a second meaning or that could be misconstrued as negative, or worse as bigoted or insensitive. Don’t pick a name that is too “adult” or risqu