CSS3

Here at css3.info we have a limited amount of resources, yet I’d like to push this site a little further then it’s already going, so I’m hoping you guys out there can help us out! What we need, are test cases for the different modules. The first that comes to mind, or actually was a request of Eric Seidel, Webkit developer: multi-column layout testcases.

Our current preview page doesn’t match the last version of the module, and browsers like Safari 3 are catching up, so we need more tests of it! If you make a testcase which we publish you will of course receive full credit for it in the footer of such a testcase.

The announcement of the formation of the CSS Eleven has caused quite a stir in the web development community, with a few questions raised over the self-appointed nature of the group and the way the announcement has been presented. One thing that everyone agrees on, however, is that there’s a clear and obvious need for their existence.

We spoke to Andy Clarke, respected designer and author, who announced the group’s formation (and explained it further here), and asked him a few questions about what we can expect from the CSS Eleven.

1. Please could you sum up very briefly for anyone who hasn’t read your introduction what the CSS Eleven is, and what you aim to do.

   One of the biggest challenges that the CSS Working Group faces is engineering solutions that meet the expectations of visual designers and developers. Leaving aside for a moment their other difficult tasks such as internationalization, understanding what designers need is a tough job; particularly as CSS gets more complex in the areas of layout, typography and other design related areas. The members of the working group, largely technical people, need help. They need practical help to understand what designers need, and in detail. This help cannot come simply from reading emails that are sent to them with suggestions. So far, the channels of communication between creative people and the CSS Working Group have been difficult and many people that I speak to feel that a new way needs to be found to get the designer’s voice heard and their needs understood.

   CSS Eleven is an informal group of visual designers and developers who have agreed to give up a little of their time to helping the CSS Working Group to understand what we need from CSS in the future. We will help by making suggestions, but more importantly by providing clear, real-world, visual, graphical examples of the results of the CSS that we need and helping with making test suites; two areas that have proven very time consuming in the past.

   Are we the only group that the Working Group will listen to? I hope not. We’re simply the first of what I hope will many ways that visual designers and developers get together to help make sure that CSS3 is what designers deserve it to be.

2. How will you arrive at the decisions as to which modules are most keenly needed?

   The decision to look at CSS Multi-Columns was purely mine as it is a mature draft with some features already available to test in some browsers. In the future I’m sure that efforts will be focussed on the modules that matter most to us as visual designers (personally, I’m particularly looking forward to seeing what happens with Advanced Layout). I’m sure that we’ll get lots of feedback and suggestions from the industry at large too.

3. Won’t it be hard to make judgements about implementation when there are no browsers available to test the more advanced features on?

   Of course implementation is important, and we would hope that the browser makers on the CSS Working Group will help us all they can by continuing to implement new features. For me as a visual designer, describing the features that I need from CSS visually is one of the most important jobs that I can do to help the development of CSS. We need clear, real-world visual examples from people who also understand CSS from an everyday working perspective. I’m sure that with so many great people volunteering, there will be plenty to work on.

4. What kind of timescale are you looking at for releasing the first batch of recommendations?

   I would think that we will two months working collaboratively on CSS Multi-Columns, after which I expect that we will open the wiki (or some similar facility) to a wider audience for a month before wrapping things up and handing it to the CSS Working group. Of course everybody involved is volunteering some of their valuable time, so time-scales may change.

5. Which aspect of CSS 3 are you personally most looking forward to?

   Grid Positioning and Advanced Layout will help to solve many of the problems that designers face every day using CSS. There has been a little confusion about the role of Grid Positioning and its relationship to Advanced Layout, but both are exciting developments that I am looking forward to seeing.

Kornel mailed me today with an addition to the text-shadow preview page, that looks quite good :). He noted that the Safari implementation of text-shadow is a bit poor, as it supports only one shadow, and they are offset wrong by 1px. Thanks Kornel!

If you have any additions or new preview pages, feel free to contact us!

The latest Webkit builds now support an open implementation of the @font-face rule, which we wrote about some time ago. Recent articles by Håkon Wium Lie had indicated that Opera might be first to market with this, but the Webkit team seem to have beaten them to it.

In short, @font-face allows you to download fonts to the visitor’s browser, meaning you can use any licensed font to display your pages. An example of use would be:

@font-face {
font-family: 'The New Font';
src: url('http://www.example.net/newfont/');
}

It’s a step forward for the web, and I’m delighted it’s here. Congratulations to the Webkit team, and here’s hoping that Opera push forward with their plans to implement it too. It seems like Firefox 3 won’t support this rule, so late 2008 may be the earliest we see this in Mozilla browsers.

As for Internet Explorer, they’ve actually implemented @font-face since version 4! However, it only works with their proprietary font format, .eot, and never took off. I wonder if they will reimplement it with Open- or True-Type fonts now.

@font-face isn’t actually new in CSS 3, it’s been around since CSS 2. However, as it’s never been properly introduced I think it’s okay to include it here!

The CSS Working Group recently met face-to-face in Beijing, and have released a series of notes about some of the issues they discussed regarding the current and future states of CSS.

One interesting possibility that was raised is to allow rotation of page elements; according to the original proposal, these are some of the possible use cases:

1. rotate a block of text 90 degrees as for a tab on left of page
2. rotate an image (or block of text) an arbitrary amount
3. use rotated column headings for narrow table columns

It must be stressed that this exists purely as an idea at the moment, so we won’t be seeing it any time soon. Still, it would create many new possibilities in web design.

Following our discussion of the inherent ambiguity in the border-radius declaration, it has been decided that the simpler syntax used by Mozilla will used for the shorthand; that is, in order to apply elliptical corners on elements, you will have to declare them all separately. I think this is a good decision, and I’m delighted that the CSSWG have listened to the views of the community. A pat on the back for everyone involved!

Finally, the CSSWG are to release an annual(?) snapshot of modules considered stable, in order that browser makers and developers can begin to implement them. The 2007 snapshot will include:

• CSS2.1
• Selectors
• CSS3 Color
• CSS Namespaces

The 2008 version is likely to include Paged Media and Media Queries, and possibly Ruby and Backgrounds and Borders.

So that’s the state of CSS today. Interesting stuff; many thanks to the CSSWG for making it all public.

Until the Advanced Layout and Grid Layout modules are implemented, we have to get by with the existing tricks of the trade. One of those is the use of faux columns, a background image which simulates equal-height columns. This is a good technique, but the drawback is that it only works with fixed-width columns.

That problem was overcome with the advent of liquid faux columns, which uses some background-position trickery and a bit of maths to create a variable-width effect.

With the (tentative) introduction of background-size in Safari and Opera, however, faux columns are about to become a lot easier; all you need to do is create a background image and assign a percentage value to background-size, allowing the image to expand or contract with its containing box.

Take a look at this example (only tested in Safari 3 and Opera 9.5; may work in Konqueror 3.5.7 also). If you resize your browser window, the text and columns should maintain their proportions.

The way this is done is with a simple PNG image; I’ve made it 1000px wide, with two coloured columns of 250px each, so that it’s easier to calculate column widths (25%,50%,25%).

I’ve set this as the background-image on the html element, which has been assigned a width of 90%. Inside this there is a container div with a width of 100%, and my three columns with the widths set at the same ratio as the background image:

<div id="container">
	<div id="one">
	</div>
	<div id="two">
	</div>
	<div id="tre">
	</div>
</div>

#container {
position: relative;
width: 100%;
}
#one {
margin: 0 25%;
}
#two, #tre {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
width: 25%;
}
#two { left: 0; }
#tre { right: 0; }

The html element has the background-size declaration applied to it, with a percentage value to make it liquid, using the browser-specific prefixes followed by the proposed declaration (for safety):

html {
background-image: url('opera_bg.png');
-khtml-background-size: 100%;
-o-background-size: 100%;
-webkit-background-size: 90%;
background-size: 100%;
background-position: 50% 0;
background-repeat: repeat-y;
width: 90%;

You’ll notice that the Webkit value is different from the others; during this test, it seems that Webkit obtains its width from the entire browser window, not from the containing element; therefore, we have to set this value to be equal to the width of the containing element. I haven’t tested this thoroughly yet, so I’m not sure if this is a persistent bug or if there’s something I’m doing wrong. Anyway, Opera 9.5 behaves as expected.

After that I’ve added the background-position and background-repeat declarations; background-repeat to tile the image down the page, and background-position because Webkit seems to ignore the margin values and puts the image at top left of the browser window; this is only necessary if you’re centre-aligning your page.

Apart from a little tidying up, that’s it; once the module becomes a recommendation and the browser-specific prefixes are dropped, it will require only a few lines of code for the simple effect. In the meantime, remember that this is for experimentation purposes only and shouldn’t be used in a live environment. This is just a sketch of the technique at the moment, and requires more testing.

CSS3 now has a new proposal for laying out websites, with the release of the first working draft of the grid positioning module. The new module makes it easier to define layouts using typographic grids (see Khoi Vinh’s website for a good introduction).

Used in conjunction with the multi-column layout module, you can use the new gr measurement unit to define objects that span multiple columns:

body { columns:3; column-gap:0.5in; } 
img { float:page top right; width:3gr; }

Or, using the new grid-columns and grid-rows declarations, you could quickly divide up a page for layout purposes:

body { grid-columns: * * (0.5in * *)[2];
grid-rows: 20% *;
columns:3; column-gap:0.5in; }

I’ve only had the chance for a cursory look at this so far, but it strikes me that it’s not quite as intuitive as it could be, although I need to have a proper look before I can put my finger on exactly why. However, it’s a nice attempt by the W3 to solve the problem of print-style layouts, and after further revision I’m sure it will be a welcome addition.

We’re busy here at css3.info! Our interview with H&kon was cool of course, but then Opera 9.5 was released and we had to update and add quite a few pages… Because all these pages were still static html, that was quite a bit of work. Tonight I took the time to move all of them into WordPress, and after I’d done that, I’ve refined the search function and results a bit, so it now shows the pages in the searches as well!

We’ll probably be adding new preview pages in the coming days, I’ve already updated the existing ones which Opera 9.5 supports now (cool, cool stuff, you should really have a look at it).

Ow and because of the many complaints about it, I removed the text-shadow from the text in the menu tabs.

Here’s the concluding part of our interview with Håkon (you can read the first part here).

6. Name the top five CSS3 features you’d like all major browsers to support in their next major release.

   Here’s some of my favorites:

   • Backgrounds and borders
   • Media queries
   • Multi-column layout
   • Selectors
   • Paged media

   Also, we must not forget Generated content, and tables from CSS2.1. These are great features that still can’t be used due to lack of support from one browser.

7. Do you think there should be a Acid3 that focuses on CSS3 features that designs want supported as soon as possible?

   Yes, I think it’s time for another Acid test — all major browsers but one (guess which one!) support Acid2 by now. I believe Acid3 should test CSS3 features that a critical mass of browsers can agree to implement. Also, it should probably test features from the upcoming HTML5 and the DOM.

8. Do you have a favourite designer who you admire their work, either from a design or technical respect?

   I can’t give you one name. I often show designs from the CSS Zen garden when I give talks; I like many of them.

   I can name two favorite fonts designers, though: Ray Larabie and Dieter Steffmann.

9. How do you think designers can get more involved with the CSS3 progress, to make sure features designed by designers themselves are added to the spec, instead of the features the spec writers might think are important? Is there a way this can be done without designers (many who don’t have much free time to spare) having to read through long mailing list histories and understanding a lot of very technical implementation details (I’m thinking such as having a appointed advisory board of designers for example that advise what features they want, and gather feedback from others, then the implementers can discuss this and come back with issues or start to draft specs for those features)?

   We’ve always encouraged designers to be part of the CSS Working Group, and there has always been strong designer presence in www-style. Many of the choices we’ve made along the way are based on input from designers. For example, you wouldn’t find Backgrounds and borders on top of my list if it hadn’t been for designers. The idea of an advisory board may be a good one.

10. How do you feel about being nicknamed “the father of css”?

    I often refer to CSS as my baby, and I’m fine with being called the father :-) It must be emphasized, though, that the child was shaped by a community. Bert Bos was the first to join the efforts, he came with a proposal of his own that we worked into CSS. Thomas Reardon and Chris Wilson of Microsoft were also influential in the time before the CSS WG and and the www-style mailing list was started.

11. What do you think of the Brazilian band CSS?

    Wow. Right. Change of mindset. Music, right? When it comes to music, I prefer Opera!

We’ve had some great interviews with luminaries of CSS-based design here on CSS3.info already, but this one is my personal favourite! Håkon Wium Lie, ‘the father of CSS’*, spared us some time to answer a few questions about the evolution of web design and the future of CSS. I’m so excited by this, I’ve almost forgiven our friends at Opera for not letting us have an early preview of Opera 9.5!

1. Is the use of web fonts the next big step in web design?

   Yes! Web fonts will be the next big thing if browsers start supporting them. Fonts are one of the core ingredients of design, along with space and colors. CSS is pretty good with space, colors, and fonts, but in the case of fonts the raw materials — the font files — are in short supply. Interestingly, there are lots of freely available TrueType font that authors allow us to use for free. So, I’m trying to connect the dots between web pages and the available fonts. I’ve written more about this in an article in Alistapart and you can play with web fonts in Prince.

2. With the current battles over copyright infringement with music and video on the web, can you imagine something similar occurring over the misuse of rights-protected fonts?

   Almost all the content on the web is copyrighted. It’s still available because copyright holders want it to be available. Sure, there are cases when the copyright holder has not given permission. But I don’t think anyone would argue that we should remove all images, video or music from the web for this reason? There are plenty of freely available fonts out there and no need to use fonts with resistant owners. Also, plenty of new font will be created open-source style if browsers start supporting web fonts.

3. Has web design turned out more or less the way you imagined when you wrote the CSS spec so many years ago?

   CSS was partly about design, and partly about markup. We — Bert Bos and I in the beginning, soon others — wanted to improve web design, but also to keep markup clean. I think the first part has succeeded quite well; I continue to be amazed by the things people are able to do with CSS. I’m less certain about the markup. But you didn’t ask me about markup, so I don’t have to answer for it :-)

4. Outside of web fonts, which part of css needs most work in your opinion? And why?

   Lots of work has gone into the CSS specifications. That will continue, but it’s not where work is most needed. What we need now are implementations — interoperable implementations. In order to get them, we need tests and testers. Lots of them. People who are interested in this subject should join the CSS testsuite mailing list.

5. If you could start all over again, what would you do differently in CSS?

   I’ve written a long PhD thesis, in part on that subject. That’s the long answer. The short answer is that we should have published a test suite earlier. We worked hard to get the CSS1 specification right, but implementors don’t really like to read specifications. They will work long hours, however, for so that their code passes a well-designed test. Eric Meyer came to our rescue and made sure CSS1 got a the test suite.

Part two of this interview, where Håkon discusses CSS3 and web design, will be available shortly.

* Maybe we should have asked him what he thinks of that nickname!