A trifecta of interesting CSS links in my aggregator this morning. First, Luke Melia points to an interesting post about maintainable CSS, and proposes modular CSS and Dave Hyatt’s rules for CSS use in Mozilla skins as possible solutions. For myself, I lean toward the former approach; I separated structural markup (the definition of header and sidebar boxes) from presentation markup (type and colors) within different sections of my stylesheet when I was doing the first round of design improvements. Other interesting solutions in the comments to Simon’s post, including this article from Digital Web Magazine about Architecting CSS.
Second, A List Apart provides six methods, of varying degrees of semantic correctness and coolness, for achieving multi-column lists with various combinations of XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Third, ALA also talks about the multi-column module in CSS3, and introduces a Javascript parser for the CSS syntax that helps bootstrap the new capabilities in browsers that don’t yet support the extensions. You have to see some of the examples, particularly numbers 2 and 5, to get why this is so cool, but once you do it’ll make you swear off long scrolling layouts forever.