Michael Doyle | Blog

Fonts – Web Safe

Here is a list of web safe fonts that are commonly packaged with all platforms.

font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-family: 'Arial Black', Gadget, sans-serif;
font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif;
font-family: 'Comic Sans MS', cursive;
font-family: Courier, monospace;
font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-family: Garamond, serif;
font-family: Georgia, serif;
font-family: Impact, Charcoal, sans-serif;
font-family: 'Lucida Console', Monaco, monospace;
font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif;
font-family: 'MS Sans Serif', Geneva, sans-serif;
font-family: 'MS Serif', 'New York', sans-serif;
font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;
font-family: Symbol, sans-serif;
font-family: Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif;
font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
font-family: Webdings, sans-serif;
font-family: Wingdings, 'Zapf Dingbats', sans-serif;

This list was found here

CSS – 20 Helpful Websites

A list of 20 websites to master CSS

CSS – CSS Reset

There are many hacks to get past cross-browser compatibility problems. I've run into way too many of them, even though I regularly check sites in both IE and FF. One of the reasons for the problems is that some browsers add padding and margin sizes to certain elements. To remove this Yahoo has a utility called Reset CSS. IT removes all added borders, margins, everything to level the playing field so you can precisely define how you want elements defined without anything added by a browser.

UPDATE: After reading some of the comments and advise on resetting, a lot of people have highly recommended Eric Meyer's CSS Reset stylesheet.

CSS – Web Text Visualizers

CSS Font and Text Style Wizard is a handy online tool that shows you the different font attributes in CSS and shows how they affect text.
Typetester is a similar tool, but with further functionality.

Windows Font Explorer

Windows Font Explorer is a small utility that allows you to scroll through all your installed fonts and see how they look in different sizes and applied to different text.

Flash – Transparent Backgrounds

Trying to finish my Graphic design project tonight and discovered how to make a swf with a transparent background. HTML code is:

Add these parameters to the "param" tag:

param name="wmode" value="transparent"

Add this parameter to the embed tag:

wmode="transparent"

So the full code I used to embed a swf file called "brain.swf" is:

<object width="216" height="144" data="brain.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /><param name="src" value="brain.swf" /></object>

This works in Firefox 3 and IE 7, haven't tested it out on any other browsers yet. Flash 6 or higher is needed.