CSS isn’t always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren’t sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements. An easy way to minimize the complexity of the code is as useful as not-so-well-known CSS attributes and properties you can use to create a semantically correct markup.

We’ve taken a close look at some of the most interesting and useful CSS tricks, tips, ideas, methods, techniques and coding solutions and listed them below. We also included some basic techniques you can probably use in every project you are developing, but which are hard to find once you need them.

And what has come out of it is an overview of over 70 expert tips, which can improve your efficiency of CSS coding. You might be willing to check out the list of references and related articles in the end of this post.

In the good old days of the web tables were an essential requirement for creating a webpage. The first thing in laying out a webpage was to create a table. Table was then further divided into cells. Using different combinations of border and shading a number of effects could be created. But the tales and cells also created confusion and messy websites. But with advent of CSS tables can finally be replaced.

If you have been using tables in the past you will appreciate how relieveed we are by CSS. When you work with tables your HTML becomes a mess of confusing rows and columns, with no clear markers of which parts of the page do what. It is fine in the beginning but the problem occurs when you want to redesign the website. In that case you would have to extract your content from the HTML and start building the tables all over again..

There are only three parts to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and once we understand what they are and how to use them, CSS becomes very easy and exciting to use. One of the best parts of CSS is that you can create an external Cascade Style Sheet which you can use for all web pages on your website. You can also have one CSS for all of your articles and a different one for all of your press releases. Making one change in your CSS, you are able to effect changes to a few web pages or to hundreds of web pages without ever touching any of the different web pages themselves.

The CSS cheat sheet is designed to act as a reminder and reference sheet, listing all selectors (as of CSS 2.1) and properties. It includes a visual example of the box model, unit reference for CSS units and the various media types CSS makes allowance for. A description of what is on the cheat sheet follows, or if you are impatient, you can go straight to the full size CSS cheat sheet..

Later on this year Microsoft will officially release Internet Explorer 7. If you can't wait until then, you can download a beta version and see how it works. Microsoft has hinted that IE7 is officially released they'll be looking to quickly upgrade users from IE6, so it's essential that your website is prepared for this new browser..

1. Block vs. inline level elements
2. Another box model hack alternative
3. Minimum width for a page
4. IE and width & height issues
5. Text-transform command
6. Disappearing text or images in IE?
7. Invisible text...

Trying to get CSS-based websites to look the same across all browsers can often be difficult. Many of the problems however lie with Internet Explorer implementing CSS commands differently to other, more standards compliant browsers. All is not lost, however, as many of the differences you see across browsers are caused by the same Internet Explorer CSS issues...

1. CSS font shorthand rule
2. Two classes together
3. CSS border default value
4. CSS document for printing
5. Image replacement technique
6. CSS box model hack alternative
7. Centre aligning a block element...

CSS allows you to define a cursor that will be displayed at the specific element on your page. For instance, if you want to show that the clicking the element will show the context help, you can define the "help" cursor for this element.

Here are the list of cursor types you can use for the pointing device (usually, mouse). You can test each cursor by moving mouse pointer above the "Example" block..

There are various ways to use CSS markup in your site pages. You can link external stylesheets to your HTML pages, define CSS elements directly in your HTML code, but what is the best solution? Let's the describe the most popular of them and show their pros and cons...