Pure CSS Drop-down Menu

I know there are plenty of these to go around lately, but I recently completed a pure CSS drop-down menu and I thought I'd share it with the world. JavaScript drop-down menus tend to give me more headaches than they're worth and I haven't been able to find a pure CSS menu that suits my needs (mainly cross-browser compatibility), so I set out to build my own; turns out it wasn't nearly the adventure I thought it was going to be.

Firefox 3 Launches June 17th, Mozilla Goes for Guinness Record

Mozilla is set to release the highly anticipated Firefox 3 tomorrow, June 17th. The latest version of the worlds second most popular web browser features an enhanced user experience, better performance, tighter security and even more customization. All this combine to create what Mozilla call the "fastest, smartest, most powerful browser" they've released to date.

With the release of Firefox 3, Mozilla is attempting to break the Guinness world record for downloads in a 24 hour period in what they've dubbed "Download Day". You can help Mozilla reach its goal by downloading Firefox 3 by 17:00 UTC on June 18, 2008 (1pm EDT, 10AM PDT)

Using CSS Sprites to Optimize Your Image Loading

The term Sprite originates from the early computer graphics technique of using many small images to build a single larger image. This technique became unnecessary as computers grew ever more powerful, though, so the term came to refer to just the single larger image. The term was a natural fit when web designers began combining their icons, thumbnails and other images into a single larger image. And hey, it rolls off the tongue a lot easier than Single Image Multi Replacement. So why are designers combining all of their smaller images into one larger image? To save on bandwith, loading times and server requests. In the early days of the web design, splicing your images gave the appearance of faster load times since individual splices load separately. In reality, a spliced image takes longer to load. The sum is actually less than the whole of its parts. A single sprite will be significantly smaller (in file size) than the sum of all of the individual images that it's made up of.

So now that we know what sprites are and why we should use them, let's figure out how to use them. The first step is to create the sprite. This is pretty straight forward; just open up your favorite image editor and combine all of your icons or thumbnails into one graphic. You can line them up however you like, just keep in mind that the more organized they are, the easier your job will be. Putting them all one on top of another or all side by side is the easiest way to do this.