Last week I asked the question on Twitter, “What HTML element do you use for each line of a form? P, DIV, or something else?”

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That’s that over and done with for another year. Whilst the seasonal festivities will continue for a few more days yet, I talk of course of our annual dose of 24 Ways articles.

One of the reoccurring themes in this years selection pack of web design and development goodies is a concept that is splitting opinions like none other. Designing in the browser.

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The problem with CSS pre-processing frameworks is that they don’t really fit within the average web designers’ work flow. Or they don’t mine, anyway.

Having to compile and recompile at every iteration is just a pain in the backside, it’s not the way I work. I like to make some tweaks, view them in the browser, make more tweaks, view them in the browser, and repeat.

When you add in to that the process of going to the command line and recompiling, all of a sudden writing CSS becomes a dull slog. Not the way I like to work.

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Yesterday there was quite a lot of discussion on Twitter about CSS preprocessing frameworks such as SASS and LESS.

It was all in response to a blog article by Nathan Borror detailing why SASS isn’t for him. In the article’s comments there is some interesting debate on the pros and cons of preprocessing frameworks.

For the uninitiated, CSS preprocessing frameworks add clever functionality to writing stylesheets like variables and mix-ins, and ultimately result in writing less CSS to achieve the same result. A good thing in my book.

But it seems many designers are resistant to a technology that abstracts the syntax of a styling language that they are already familiar and comfortable with.

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If you’re a conscientious web designer or developer who cares about accessibility, then I’m sure you’ve spent the last few years drilling yourself into the habit of using relative font sizes (EMs or percentages) rather than absolute font sizes (pixels – PX)?

Now with the advent of modern browsers and full page zooming (as opposed to just text scaling), I’m sure I’m not the only person that’s been wondering whether we still need to be going through the painstaking task of calculating relative font sizes?

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The days of the ever resourceful all-in-one web designer-come-developer extraordinaire are long gone. In this industry the general consensus is that a great developer doth not a great designer make (and visa-versa).

It’s more common for designers and developers to work side-by-side collaboratively in web design harmony. Or not as the case may be. Designers tend to make developers jobs as fiddly as possible and developers have a knack for screwing up great designs.

It doesn’t have to be that way, here are five tips designers can follow to make developers’ jobs easier and ensure the site turns out as great as you intended.

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The CSS display property can be the bane of the web designer’s life as support varies from browser to browser, making it all a bit more complicated than it should be. In this article I will show a quick and simple way to get the display:inline-block declaration rendering consistently across all major browsers.

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With the rise of CSS and standards, the mere mention of the word ‘tables’ amongst web designers is likely to bring a reaction as if you just swore to your grandmother. For some reason the backlash towards table-based design – which ten years ago was the defacto standard way of designing complex page layouts – has become so passionately fought over that web designers can forget that tables still play an important role in modern web design. Here are three examples:

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