About a year and a half ago, however, I switched jobs and found myself dealing with the CSS of others that was quite different from my own. They went on about how nice their style was and how in time I would come around. After all, they all eventually adapted to the same style. I was fairly adamant at the time that, no, I was pretty set in my style ways and didn’t see myself switching any time soon. It only took a couple of months.

My style at the time was a declaration with each property on its own line.

body {
  margin:0;
  padding:0;
}

The style of the new shop was to use single line styles as follows:

body {margin:0; padding:0;}

Since the time I switched over, I’ve grown to love this format. My initial argument against it was I felt it was harder to read and find the individual declaration I was looking for. But if you follow a simple set of rules, it’s actually very easy to scan a large css file and find what you’re looking for.

Out of curiosity, I checked out the CSS of some bloggers I read to see what styles they use.

The closest I could find to my old style was Paul Boag. Here’s a sample:

body {
  background:#d6e59b url(../images/background.jpg);
  padding:2em 0;
}

#content {
  width:600px;
  padding:0 20px 0 30px;
}

Very similar to that style is Dan Cederholm of simplebits.com

body {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
  font-size: 62.5%;
  color: #474a51;
  background: #f4f4ed;
  }
a:link, a:visited {
  color: #317b9e;
  text-decoration: none;
  }

You can see two differences here. The closing brace is tabbed in with the declarations, and he puts a space between the declaration and the values, as Boag does not.

Now we’ll get into some developers using single line declarations. First off is Eric Meyer. You’ll notice he does ‘mostly’ single line. The body declaration is broken over a couple of lines. If you scan through the css at meyerweb, you’ll see several instances of that treatment. Eric also does the space between the declaration and the value.

* {font-size: 100%; padding: 0; margin: 0;}
body {font: 0.84em/1.333 Arial, sans-serif; margin: 0; padding: 0;
  color: #202020; background: #FFF;
  min-width: 40em; margin: 0 auto;}
h1 {font-size: 2em; margin: 2em 0 0.5em; padding: 0.25em 0;}
h2 {font-size: 1.5em; margin: 2em 0 0.33em; padding: 0.25em 0;}

Next up is A List Apart and Dan Rubin from superflousbanter.org. Both use primarily single line styles. The differences you’ll notice are A List Apart puts spaces between pretty much everything.

* {margin: 0; padding: 0;}
body {font: 0.8125em Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 1; color: #333; background: #FFF;}
html body a:hover {color: #000; background-color: #F4F2E4;
  border-bottom: 1px solid #9A8E51;}
h2 {font: 1.5em Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; letter-spacing: 1px;}
h3 {font: bold 1em Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 2px;
  text-transform: uppercase;}

Dan Rubin on the other hand uses no spaces except for the right before and after the braces.

body { background-color:#210D00;font-family:helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:small;text-align:center;min-width:1000px;margin:0; }
#content { float:left;background:url(../i/bg_content_top.gif) no-repeat;width:618px;margin:58px 0 0 37px;padding:16px 0 0; }
#content2 { background:url(../i/bg_content_bottom.gif) no-repeat bottom;padding:0 0 16px; }
#content3 { background:#fff url(../i/bg_content_middle.gif) repeat-y;padding:3px 60px 1px; }

Finally, we come to Ordered List. This style is almost exactly like the what I use. This is because the two members of OL are both former lead developers of my department.

.wrapper            {float:left; display:inline; width:940px;}
.primary            {float:left; display:inline; width:630px; border-left:320px solid transparent; margin:0 0 0 10px;}
div#post_info h4    {color:#C0BA8D; font-size:116%; margin:0 0 15px;}

I realize that some people style a certain way due to the editor used when cutting the site. For instance, I use Coda to code HTML/CSS. When it auto-completes a style, it will put a space between the colon and the value. I find this very annoying. Especially since editors such as CSSEdit (also in my Dock) has had a preference for default spacing for years. Hopefully their upcoming all-in-one editor, Espresso, will have that as well (the current beta does not).

One final note. This site was styled prior to my metamorphasis with a lot of WordPress styles rolling over, so yes, it’s in the old style, and probably will be for quite some time.

My only problem with the thing is its name. The irony of the label “iPhone” struck me the other day as I was watching the news with the wife and an iPhone commercial came on. More accurately, I should say I was listening to the news. I was technically reading news feeds and catching up on email. It got me thinking about how much time I spent on this device doing various activities. I’m thinking it breaks down as follows:

Reading news feeds - 70%
Email - 10%
Games - 15%
Other – 4%
Phone - 1%

That one percent may be a little high. It might be that I simply subscribe to too many feeds. All I know is that this handy little device is seriously cutting down on the amount of time I spend sitting at my desk in the evenings. That alone is a wonderful thing.

The folks over at Rails for PHP Developers have a pretty good start on content, especially for Array, String and Filesystem functions. The feature I was planning on, which I am not seeing their site, is a way for the community to contribute. Even if it were heavily moderated, I think it would be a boon for the site to flesh out its reference much more quickly.

I had the best of intentions. I wanted to give you words. Words to make you laugh. Words to make you cry. Words to excite, enlighten and inspire.

So what happened?

Code. Code happened. I’m up to my eyeballs in freelance work. Many of you know first hand how busy things can get when you work full-time, and also take side jobs. There may be relief soon. My previous employer is finally beefing up his stable of monkey’s. These monkey’s will soon take over the work I’ve been handling since I left the outfit last July. This will hopefully free up some evening time so I can finally write some decent articles. I’m making a list, checking it twice, and will begin authoring soon.

Stay tuned. I plan on doing some small articles soon, as well as a book review.

Maybe.

Only added mine 10 minutes ago and I’m already quite fond.