> As you may have expected, no images used here. Instead, an base64 string is used to create the patterned effect.
A base64 encoded image is still an image. Just from a syntactic point of view it pisses me off that people say this, it makes their accomplishment seem more interesting than it actually is.
Yeah I was just about to lay down the same comment - this is just stupid. If I wrote an article called "all css images!" and it was just a base64 encoded image, would that get even a single upvote?
But don't completely disparage it. It saves an HTTP request to include it in the CSS. (Though typically it compresses 30% worse. For smaller images like this, that is not an issue.)
The advantages of pure CSS buttons are way over-hyped at the moment. After spending about half a day experimenting recently, our conclusion was that we’re going to stick with images, and just produce a hi-dpi and lo-dpi version to maintain quality on the new hi-res displays.
If you want a carbon copy of everyone else’s buttons, with a thin border, slightly rounded corners, and a gradient/inset shadow creating a slight rounding effect, CSS is OK.
However, as soon as you want anything more distinctive, you run into cross-browser problems almost immediately. IE9 doesn’t support CSS text-shadow and gradients. IE8 and below don’t support rounded corners or shadows either, and they seem to have problems using the full range of weights available with some popular web fonts, too.
Even with a bleeding edge version of Chrome or Firefox, there are only so many effects you can generate with styles alone, and even then the results of fine-tuned visual effects generated by Photoshop are often visibly superior to a limited version of the same effects applied using CSS.
In other words, there is still no browser available today whose rendering engine can compete with one of the heavyweight professional graphics applications. That’s hardly surprising, yet if you read all the trendy design blogs you’d think it was crazy talk! :-)
The thing that really swung it for us, though, was that most of the advantages of using only HTML and CSS turned out to be illusory anyway, at least for our site.
We do have to create a separate button for each label we want to use instead of just changing the text in HTML, but that takes only a few seconds with Photoshop. As I noted above, we spent half a day experimenting with button styles using CSS and never found anything satisfactory across the full range of browsers we have to support.
Having plain text in the HTML might seem better semantically, but it’s unlikely that we actually care about button labels for SEO purposes, and we still have all the same image accessibility hints available as we always did.
The image file size and number of requests might be important concerns in some applications, but if you’ve only got a couple of buttons on a page, it’s unlikely to make any perceptible difference to performance. They might even be smaller than trying to encode all the cross-browser styling information in CSS and/or adding various non-semantic mark-up in the HTML to support it, and that potentially applies whether you download them as separate images or you embed them in the CSS using the data: syntax.
In short, pure CSS buttons seem to have few actual advantages over images and tend to bring a significant loss of quality and distinctiveness in the best browsers and horrible degradation in older but still relevant versions of IE. Unless you actually need to generate the button labels on the fly — and even then, you can still use a background image — I don’t see a good case for moving away from tried-and-tested image-based buttons to a pure CSS approach for most projects.
They look good, particularly the grouped buttons. The shadows from the neighboring grouped buttons are a nice touch.
I think it might look a little bit better if the noise pattern didn't disappear on the buttons' down states. The noise pattern is essentially simulating a rough surface, so it seems a little odd that pressing a button would cause its material to change.
Try zooming into the play button in iTunes. It's a good example of a button with noise, even in the down state.
Instead of classes for each color (".red", ".blue", etc) you should use classes which indicate state or function (".primary", ".warning", ".success"). Otherwise you might find yourself editing a lot of code just to change the colors of your buttons.
The repeating pattern applied to the button isn't a stylistic pattern but a texture. Looks great none-the-less, I just wouldn't call them "patterned buttons".
Too bad they don't follow platform conventions like normal buttons. On Windows, clicking a button and then moving the mouse off it while keeping the button down releases the button the moment the cursor leaves the button's area and the button isn't activated.
[+] [-] Kudos|13 years ago|reply
A base64 encoded image is still an image. Just from a syntactic point of view it pisses me off that people say this, it makes their accomplishment seem more interesting than it actually is.
[+] [-] jenius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoelSutherland|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pioul|13 years ago|reply
If you had used an image, that would have been 4.17kb for the image and only 6.75kb for the CSS, for a total of 10.92kb (instead of 75!)
[+] [-] Chris_Newton|13 years ago|reply
If you want a carbon copy of everyone else’s buttons, with a thin border, slightly rounded corners, and a gradient/inset shadow creating a slight rounding effect, CSS is OK.
However, as soon as you want anything more distinctive, you run into cross-browser problems almost immediately. IE9 doesn’t support CSS text-shadow and gradients. IE8 and below don’t support rounded corners or shadows either, and they seem to have problems using the full range of weights available with some popular web fonts, too.
Even with a bleeding edge version of Chrome or Firefox, there are only so many effects you can generate with styles alone, and even then the results of fine-tuned visual effects generated by Photoshop are often visibly superior to a limited version of the same effects applied using CSS.
In other words, there is still no browser available today whose rendering engine can compete with one of the heavyweight professional graphics applications. That’s hardly surprising, yet if you read all the trendy design blogs you’d think it was crazy talk! :-)
The thing that really swung it for us, though, was that most of the advantages of using only HTML and CSS turned out to be illusory anyway, at least for our site.
We do have to create a separate button for each label we want to use instead of just changing the text in HTML, but that takes only a few seconds with Photoshop. As I noted above, we spent half a day experimenting with button styles using CSS and never found anything satisfactory across the full range of browsers we have to support.
Having plain text in the HTML might seem better semantically, but it’s unlikely that we actually care about button labels for SEO purposes, and we still have all the same image accessibility hints available as we always did.
The image file size and number of requests might be important concerns in some applications, but if you’ve only got a couple of buttons on a page, it’s unlikely to make any perceptible difference to performance. They might even be smaller than trying to encode all the cross-browser styling information in CSS and/or adding various non-semantic mark-up in the HTML to support it, and that potentially applies whether you download them as separate images or you embed them in the CSS using the data: syntax.
In short, pure CSS buttons seem to have few actual advantages over images and tend to bring a significant loss of quality and distinctiveness in the best browsers and horrible degradation in older but still relevant versions of IE. Unless you actually need to generate the button labels on the fly — and even then, you can still use a background image — I don’t see a good case for moving away from tried-and-tested image-based buttons to a pure CSS approach for most projects.
[+] [-] JoelSutherland|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgdesign|13 years ago|reply
I haven't had time to update the app in a while, but it's still quite handy. Also works well for (very) small icons.
[+] [-] drifkin|13 years ago|reply
I think it might look a little bit better if the noise pattern didn't disappear on the buttons' down states. The noise pattern is essentially simulating a rough surface, so it seems a little odd that pressing a button would cause its material to change.
Try zooming into the play button in iTunes. It's a good example of a button with noise, even in the down state.
[+] [-] Smudge|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesrom|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] synor|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omi|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ferongr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nilliams|13 years ago|reply
I'd also wager 99.9% of users do not care in the slightest about that behaviour.