Accordion is a UI pattern made up of a series of containers for your content, all of which are closed when the new panel opens and reveals itself. Chris Coyier came up with Grid Accordion (powered by jQuery and CSS). It works with the same theory as most other accordions. Only one cell is opened at a time. The big thing is that the column of the current open cell expands to a reasonable reading width. The effect is really awesome as it offers you a handy alternative to classical accordions, by adding all the data you need in a single table.

One way to look at an accordion is like a collapsed single column of a table. I was recently building a page for a client site, where the information that they provided really made sense to present as a table. But it was too much information to view all at once. I thought it would have been overwhelming visually. I also thought that it was most likely that people visiting this page would know what they needed right away, so having them click once to get it seemed pretty reasonable. So, a table of accordions!

EZ-CSS is a light (1kb), flexible, browser-friendly and easy to use CSS Framework. It works by forcing the final element in the HTML flow to become a block formatting context. EZ-CSS is an easy 4-step process: Insert, Copy, Paste, Edit. This framework lets you create multiple columns of any width, with or without gutters of any width. The small stylesheet can be integrated into any existing style sheet (or in a style element) which makes this solution “framework agnostic”.

EZ-CSS relies on very light HTML markup and CSS rules, but its developers pushed the envelope even further for those who need fast results without increasing the risk of breakage. Their “Quick & Dirty” solution is less semantic than the regular method, but it relies on fewer hooks in the markup, fewer rules in the style sheet and at the same time creates a width-less block formatting context without the caveats that come with using DIVs.

If you are a web developer that needs a documentation template page for his (software) products than this post should raise your interest. I will share with you 2 templates that I found and really liked because they are very easy to customize. Why spending time creating a template when you could use a free one and focus your attention on just writing the content and improve product’s quality? Each template has common fields that should be on every doc template such as contact section, author information, overview, and usage.

The HTML/CSS format is preferable since it can be viewed by anyone in a browser. PDF’s and other Video files might require extra software for the buyer/client to view.
Read the rest of this entry…

The Envato Team launched recently a new sub-category on Themeforest specifically for CVs/Resumes optimized for web. It’s becoming more and more common for potential customers to request a link to your personal website/CV page rather than a sheet of paper. More and more recruiters are browsing online for prospective applicants instead of advertising their position and calling for applicants. Whether you are a freelancer or you’re looking for a job, these beautiful designed HTML templates will broaden your chance of getting more clients.

1) Clean CV / Resume Html Template + 4 Bonuses!

The download package includes:

• 2 CV / Resume HTML + CSS Template Layouts
• Print ready CSS stylesheet besides the regular one
• An awesome AJAX Contact Form
• PNG and PSD Source Files
• Bonus folder with Envelope, CV, Business card, Letter in .indd format + jpg previews
• Extensive step-by-step documentation on customizing each section of the template

Buy Now | Live Preview | View Screenshots

View more awesome resume web templates…

Ashley Ford from PaperMashup is a sharing a nice tutorial about creating a set of pretty CSS3 buttons that are both cross browser compliant and degrade gracefully for non CSS3 compliant browsers. Currently, compatible CSS3 browsers are Safari, Chrome and FireFox 3+. It is worth noting that if you’re using Internet Explorer you’re not going to see all the effects as Microsoft’s browser still doesn’t support CSS3.

A button is customized by adding a chain of CSS classes. This way you can set the color and size. The button uses an overlay background image. This is useful for the gradient effect. For IE6 you’ll need to use a PNG transparency hack to make a 24 bit PNG’s render correctly. Another thing to notice is the way colors are defined. All are set using RGBA which brings much more flexibility when rendering shadows.

The main goal of Easy’s framework is to provide a solid base for all of your front-end projects. This CSS/HTML/JavaScript framework is meant to reduce the amount of time spent on setting up the basic master HTML template by reusing the same coding techniques. Easy includes all 3 layers of front-end: structural, presentational and interactive. That makes it the true all-in-one solution for your next front-end project.

Easy is not just a CSS framework designed for building layouts. It includes built-in (JQuery powered) interactive functions and a library of preformatted and precoded CSS/HTML content blocks that you can simply paste into your master template.

Main features include:

• Rock-solid base HTML structure
• Predefined basic CSS styles for both screen and print
• Built-in set of interactive functions (no JavaScript code needed)
• Library of HTML content blocks that can be easily used and reused
• Basic file organization and possibility of expanding the library with your own code

Easy is rock-solid, true all-in-one front-end solution that you can easily use as it is or customize to fit your own needs.

Do you need clean, crisp and consistent buttons to improve your website’s design? Simply-Buttons v2 is a choice to consider. You can use only CSS to stylish the buttons or the JavaScript component that uses the sliding doors technique to enhance the look of the buttons. Both the look and the feel of the buttons is customizable (ex: by creating your own CSS file).

Features include:

• Buttons size to fit text.
• Support for 3 states: Inactive, Active, and Hover.
• They look and behave the same way in every browser and operating system.
• The do not need the javascript to work, they work with just the CSS
• Customizable buttons to suit your design

If you are looking for a way to take control of your CSS, then eCSStender is a choice to consider. It’s time to say hello to lean and mean CSS and forget about the browser-specific properties and hacks cluttering your files.

The following extensions are currently available or are in development:

• CSS3 Selectors
• @font-face support
• CSS rotation (currently bundled with eCSStender as an example)
• CSS3 border-radius (currently bundled with eCSStender as an example)
• CSS3 Columns

Extensions built with eCSStender greatly simplify the design process because you can author modern CSS using advanced selectors, properties such as border-radius, or custom font faces and rest assured that your design will work… even in IE6.

CSScaffold is a new type of CSS, built with PHP, that changes the way you write and manage your CSS. It speeds up your development time by doing the hard work for you. Scaffold is different to other CSS frameworks, like Blueprint and 960.gs, but it’s power lies in it’s ability to extend the CSS language. It offers you the possibility to generate the CSS found in other CSS frameworks dynamically, like grid classes to quickly build layouts. The framework uses .htaccess files to automatically pass any CSS file through Scaffold first for processing and caching. You just have to drop the files onto your server (keep the framework in your CSS directory) and you’re ready to go with the CSS you’ve already written.

Features include:

• Written like CSS (it is not necessary to learn a new language to use it)
• Usage of constants within the CSS document
• Use mixins like in SASS and Compass
• Nest selectors to tidy up your code
• Optimize, compress and gzip
• Generate test suites for typography, layouts and form styles
• Plugin architecture that lets you extend the language the way you want