Have you ever written a CSS file? Have you heard about this “lorem ipsum” thing? Or do you regularly transform designs into CSS & XHTML? If you answer one of these questions with ‘yes’, then this is for you.
What is the first thing you do when it’s time to create a new CSS file? You might start from scratch with a blank CSS every time. You might use Eric Meyer’s reset.css. You might probably work with one of the numerous CSS-frameworks, such as Blueprint CSS or YAML or even use the CSS stuff from that YUI framework. You might even start with your CMS’s standard theme and adjust things from there…
One thing you might forget when you hack in the first lines of CSS (and this happens to the best of us) is to use reallife markup instead of that boring “Lorem ipsum…” designers seem to have a faible for. This is where this markup snippet comes into play: it should help you with filling your wireframe layout with some actual HTML-markup.
So just plain HTML, huh?
This snippet provides a wide range of commonly used markup, that should be supported by most rich editors (a.k.a. WYSIWYG editors).
Since every coder has his own preferences towards class names. I decided to leave out the fancy stuff you could do with classes at all, as this would force some people to spot, delete, or rename those classes afterwards, which would be counterproductive. So this is plain HTML.
Download
Since each and every CMS treats the markup you insert into its page editor differently, I decided to provide both: a version with regular HTML and one without the paragraphs for those CMS that come with their own paragrapher-functionality.
Sample Markup v0.1 (text file, 8 KB)
Sample Markup v0.1 without paragraphs (text file, 8 KB)
Some notes: the HTML-elements included in the snippet are: p, a, abbr, acronym, samp, code, pre, ol, ul, li, blockquote, cite, q, table, caption, thead, tfoot, tbody, tr, td, th, em, strong, sup, sub, div, span
That’s basically it. Just create a code snippet in your favorite editor and remember: Sample markup is the new lorem ipsum.
Am I missing something? Looking forward your improvement suggestions.
Changelog:
v0.1 Initial version. (2009-10-9)