By Chad Holden on May 11, 2010

Usability & CSS3

Most the CSS3 techniques we’ve gone over so far have been purely cosmetic effects that aid progressive enhancement. But CSS3 can also be used to improve the usability of your pages.

Creating Multiple Columns of Text
Aids in: progressive enhancement, adaptability

Some pieces of text are more readable in narrow, side-by-side columns, similar to traditional newspaper layout. You can tell the browser to arrange your text into columns by either defining a width for each column (thecolumn-width property) or by defining a number of columns (the column-count property). Other new properties let you control gutters/gaps, rule lines, breaking between columns and spanning across columns. (For now, you need to use the browser-specific prefixes of -moz and -webkit.) This is another one of those techniques that can harm instead of aid usability if used improperly, as explained in “CSS3 Multi-column layout considered harmful,” so use it judiciously.

For details, see:

Controlling Text Wrapping and Breaking
Aids in: adaptability

CSS3 gives you more control over how blocks of text and individual words break and wrap if they’re too long to fit in their containers. Setting word-wrap to break-word will break a long word and wrap it onto a new line (particularly handy for long URLs in your text). The text-wrap property gives you a number of options for where breaks may and may not occur between words in your text. The CSS2 white-space property has now in CSS3 become a shorthand property for the new white-space-collapse and text-wrap properties, giving you more control over what spaces and line breaks are preserved from your markup to the rendered page. Another property worth mentioning, even though
it’s not currently in the CSS3 specification, is text-overflow, which allows the browser to add an ellipsis character (…) to the end of a long string of text instead of letting it overflow.

For details, see:

Media Queries
Aids in: adaptability, efficiency

CSS2 let you apply different styles to different media types — screen, print, and so on. CSS3’s media queriestake this a step further by letting you customize styles based on the user’s viewport width, display aspect ratio, whether or not his display shows color, and more. For instance, you could detect the user’s viewport width and change a horizontal nav bar into a vertical menu on wide viewports, where there is room for an extra column. Or you could change the colors of your text and backgrounds on non-color displays.

Part2 Mediaqueries1 in Modern CSS Layouts, Part 2: The Essential Techniques

Part2 Mediaqueries2 in Modern CSS Layouts, Part 2: The Essential Techniques

This demo file from Opera uses media queries to rearrange elements and resize text and images based on viewport size.

Media queries couldn’t come at a better time — there is more variety in the devices and settings people use to browse the web than ever before. You can now optimize your designs more precisely for these variations to provide a more usable and attractive design, but without having to write completely separate style sheets, use JavaScript redirects, and other less efficient development practices.

Media queries are supported to some degree by all the major browsers except IE, and there are lots of great articles and tutorials explaining how to use them right now:

Media queries are particularly helpful in serving alternate styles to small-screen mobile devices, as these articles and tutorials explain:

For other options on how to deal with mobile devices, see Mobile Web Design Trends For 2009.

From Smashing Magazine

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