Thursday, March 6, 2014

CSS Code Snippets


People love to save time.  It’s no surprise to find that developers enjoy saving time as well.  Mentioned in a previous blog post, developers are very particular about which code editor they use.  As we saw with Sublime Text 2, some editors have built in features that allow users to save time and code faster.  In this week’s post, we will go over another way in which people save time while working on projects: CSS code snippets.

CSS can be very basic; it’s a markup language.  In contrast to JavaScript, there is usually just one or two ways to make the document behave or look a certain way.  As a result, you can easily build something and share it with somebody.  CSS is very easy to tweak as well, so why not allow users to change up the code so that it suits their needs?

Some friendly and good-hearted developers have done just that.

Let’s say you want to quickly build a div that has a border radius.  If you’re like me, you still have trouble remembering the exact syntax to do so and looking up the documentation for it can be time consuming.  Instead of researching, try finding a tool for it.  In the border radius example, you can adjust the settings of the CSS to suit your needs.  We will go over a few websites that have these types of tools!

5 CSS Code Snippet Websites


The site provides 12 different tools including border radius, box shadow, multiple columns, transition, and transform.  One of the features that I really enjoy is the browser compatibility feature.  For each tool, the site will tell you which browsers the code is compatible with (including browser versions).


This site is a classic, fantastic resource.  The author, Chris Coyier, is well known in the developer community for his work on the site and his work with Codepen.  CSS Tricks provides a ton of snippets; some of which are more complex than CSS3Generator’s.  For example, he provides snippets for useful LESS Mixins.  He also provides snippets for other languages, so you can definitely spend a few hours here if you wanted to.


HTML5’s button tag is nice and all, but it looks extremely plain.  This fancy little tool allows you to dress up buttons.  You can even create them with gradients and hover effects.



This site provides some really nice looking results.  If you’ve got time, there are 11 full pages of code snippets ranging from toggle switches, buttons, tables, bars, etc.  A lot of it is really trendy looking as well.  The site also provides some nice looking UI kits.

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