I have to admit that when I like the design of a website I check its CSS and HTML to see the code hoping to learn something new. I’m horrible at design and I cannot make a box even if I have it in front of me for 24 hours non stop but I love all kinds of tricks to make the content more appealing: rounded boxes, sexy quote marks, bubbles, everything.

What is really weird is that all these fancy design elements are usually cut as images and put as background-image for some DIV while the vast majority of them can be recreated with CSS. I admit, not all of them are simple but some do and today I’ll show you my latest experiment. I love a certain kind of box and I’m trying to make it using CSS3 only. After a little prayer to the CSS3 God let’s start.

If you’re not a patient person skip all this and go directly to the test page.

I was watching the other day the talk that Lea Verou gave at Fronteers 2011 when she just proved that I don’t know CSS3 at all.

One thing caught my attention: CSS3 patterns. Making some of my own was the next step. It’s a great way of learning the specs a bit better cause I must confess I never read them properly and never bothered with the small details.

Inspired from the print world people from Adobe and Microsoft are coming with new features that might (or might not) be embedded into future CSS specs. These new features – CSS Regions and CSS Exclusions – will allow text to flow into webpages pretty much like they do in newspapers and magazines.

Styling a form is never an easy thing to do, but adding CSS3 on a HTML5 form is a task that shows a large variety of results when it comes to testing on different browsers. Check the test link.

When it comes to CSS3 not much can be done: but adding rounded corners, gradients and dropshadows is still more than nothing anf the overall aspect of the form is waaaaaaaaay better. But HTML5 is supported by few browsers (this HTML form only by Opera) and CSS3 also by few broswers – but different from the one supporting HTML5.