CSS3

As you might have seen, we have moved the blog from /blog/ to the main domain, since the homepage wasn’t exactly useful anyway. In the process we have moved some pages that were static into WordPress, and we will be doing that for most other pages as well in the coming weeks. If you see glitches, feel free to mail us, we’ll try and fix it.

Mozilla released Gran Paradiso alpha 2, which is what will become Firefox 3. Running it through the CSS selectors testsuite shows there’s been a few improvements. It passed 32 out of the 43 selectors. Only 4 are buggy and 7 unsupported. That’s not a big improvement over Firefox 2.0.0.1, as that browser passes 26 of the 43, with 10 buggy and the same number of unsupported selectors. It looks like they’ve debugged issues with their attribute selectors so far, but this is only an alpha so there’s likely lots of improvements yet to come.

Sometimes it’s difficult to figure out why we might need some aspects of CSS3. Like why would anyone ever need :not()? After all, it’s like it works on elements we don’t care to style. Why would we need that?

Recently I posted about Konqueror 3.5.6 and said:

It really is a shame that only a tiny proportion of web users have access to this excellent browser.

That comment was picked up by this blogger who responded:

Virtually every web user can use Konqueror. All they would need to do is install an operating system like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, or Mac OS X.

The future of webdesign part II

In part two of the interview series we’ve dubbed “the future of webdesign”, we have an interview with Veerle Pieters, one of the best webdesigners on this planet, and a lovely lady as well!

Check it out:

Andy Clarke’s Transcending CSS is a book that anyone involved with client-side web development should read.

For web designers who know some code there is plenty of forward thinking material about the importance of semantic HTML; for coders with an eye for design there is lots of food for thought about colour, style and inspiration; for everyone, there are some genuinely innovative tips on using CSS to tie it all together.

Are you dying to play with some of those CSS3 features that Opera‘s implementing, or is it just me? Well, it turns out there’s a way we can play with them already.

There’s a little program that takes XML+CSS and turns it into PDF‘s. It’s called PrinceXML, which already supports all those wonderful little CSS3 selectors the Opera folks are making us salivate over. The only downside here, is that PrinceXML isn’t a web browser, but a printing program. It’s still very useful and gives us a good playground to practice on.

Here’s a partial list of CSS3 selectors PrinceXML supports:

• E ~ F
• E:not()
• E:nth-child()
• E:nth-of-type()
• E::before
• E::after

Have fun!

We seem to be geting a nice partner in promoting CSS3: David Storey from Opera. His latest post shows you how to make buttons with CSS3 and without images. It’s a great post with some simple examples of how you can use text-shadow and rounded corners to create good looking buttons. Check it out!

As one of our readers has pointed out to us, the latest (3.5.6) release of the KHTML rendering engine passes all of the tests in our CSS selector testsuite – making the Konqueror 3.5.6 browser the most CSS3-compatible of all.

Also in the latest release is the implementation of text-overflow: ellipsis. It really is a shame that only a tiny proportion of web users have access to this excellent browser.

David Storey, Chief Web Opener at Opera, has announced on his blog that the latest internal builds of the Opera browser have advanced CSS3 selectors support.

Some of the new selectors are already enabled in the builds, while others have been implemented but not yet enabled due to technical reasons. All are hoped to be available in a future release version.