CSS3

Opera have once again kicked their level of CSS3 support up a notch with the release of the latest beta version of their popular web browser. Opera version 11.10 beta, code named ‘Barracuda’, was first unveiled at this weeks SXSW in Austin, Texas, before being made available for download as a public beta yesterday.

The most notable improvements to the browser, in terms of CSS3, are support for CSS3 multi-column layout and partial support for CSS3 gradients.

Update: this offer is now available for the foreseeable future

Think Vitamin are offering free access to their entire CSS3 Video Training Course for 24 hours, until Wednesday March 16th at 11:59pm.

The series, totalling 51 videos, covers CSS3 basics such as border-radius, box-shadow and CSS3 gradients, as well as more complex subjects including CSS3 selectors, transitions, animations and transforms.

Over the course of the last two weeks, the W3C CSS Working Group have issued three updated CSS3 specifications. The first sees the CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders module return to candidate recommendation, with the second and third providing updated working drafts of the CSS3 Text and CSS3 Image Values and Replaced Content modules respectively.

The working group also introduced a new module, CSS3 Writing Modes, just over 2 weeks ago on the 1st February. This recent flurry of activity represents the first major updates to the CSS3 specifications since the CSS3 Color module was released as a proposed recommendation in October last year.

Let’s take a look at what’s new. 

The new CSS3 icon, part of the HTML5 brand (image courtesy of W3C).

On the 18th January the W3C unveiled a logo and brand identity for HTML5 and associated technologies.

The HTML5 logo and accompanying icons (shown below), including one for CSS3 (larger version above), are, according to the W3C at the time of launch, intended to be “an all-purpose banner for HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and other technologies that constitute an open web platform. The logo does not have a specific meaning; it is not meant to imply conformance or validity, for example. The logo represents ‘the Web platform’ in a very general sense.”

CSS3 for Web Designers, released yesterday, is the second instalment in A Book Apart’s For Web Designers series of mini books for, unsurprisingly, web designers.

The book, available both as an ebook (now) and a paperback (from 22nd Nov), aims to show designers those aspects of CSS3 which can be comfortably used today, along with workarounds for older browsers which don’t support CSS3 (e.g. Internet Explorer 6.0 through 8.0).

The latest Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview (build 6) released yesterday at Microsoft’s professional developers conferences adds further support for CSS3, specifically CSS3 2D Transforms.

The W3C have this week released an updated working draft of the CSS3 Text module. Major changes from the previous working draft, released in March 2007, include:

The CSS Working Group met in Oslo last month for three days of face to face meetings.

The minutes, available on the CSS Working Group’s blog, reveal discussions around CSS2.1, several CSS3 modules, a rough draft of the Working Group’s priorities for 2010 and even taking Microsoft to task over their controversial test results published earlier this year.

Google have recently updated their HTML5ROCKS site, originally launched in June this year, with numerous new demos and tutorials for HTML5 and CSS3. The latest update adds, amongst other articles, a tutorial for CSS3 Web Fonts (with @font-face) and a new ‘HTML5 Studio’ – offering a number of live demos for many of the new possibilities offered by HTML5 and CSS3.

Since being updated the site has been causing quite a stir online and if you’ve not come across the site before, it’s an excellent resource for getting to grips with HTML5 & CSS3 and certainly worth a visit.

The CSS Working Group published an updated Candidate Recommendation of the Media Queries module on the 27th July.