CSS3

IE7 is gaining market share and we can start to use more CSS3 selectors in our day to day code. Because of this, it’s worth a quick reminder that the more semantic we make our (X)HTML, the easier to implement the selectors will be.

For example, imagine the opportunities with the XFN microformat; by combining this with the partial attribute selector, you can add a little flourish to your pages.

Dave Hyatt over at the WebKit blog announced that the WebKit nightly now supports multiple columns. I’ve updated the css3 preview page for multi-column layout to match this great news, and I hope more browsers will pick up one of the best new features of CSS3!

The latest issue of the UK's .net magazine features an interview (update: the interview is now available to read here) with the general manager of the Internet Explorer team, Dean Hachamovitch.

He raises the point that not every internet user wants their browser upgraded every year, saying:

During the open mic session [at the Mix conference], someone said "please don't ship a browser every year – I can't handle that"… [There] are people who say, "I'm using an extranet in order to get my billing done and I'm scared. I really don't want browser changes because this is how I get paid".

The WebKit developers are working hard on new CSS3 features. Last night Dave Hyatt mailed the webkit-dev mailinglist and blogged about the fact that box-shadow is now completely supported. I've quickly created a preview page for it. Then fellow CSS3 enthusiast Nicholas Shanks spoke to me on IM today and told me that the WebKit developers are working on supporting multiple column layouts as well. If you upgrade to the latest nightly, you can see their progress!

Recently I began planning a brief tutorial on using the CSS3 attribute selectors (which are now implemented in all the latest major browsers) to add decoration to hyperlinks. Looks like I don’t need to now, however, as this morning I found this article: Showing Hyperlink Cues with CSS, which explains the method very well.

Some of you might have noticed that this site is not valid CSS, which is of course a tid bit weird for a site as this… There’s a reason for this though. New CSS3 features are often “tested” by browser manufacturers by implementing them as vendor specific extensions. These are allowed by both CSS2.1 and CSS3, yet, the validator does error on them, even when it’s validation profile is set to CSS3.

Last month I did an audit on some websites I manage to see what kind of take-up IE7 had; the figure varied between 1% and 12% of total visitors. Now that Microsoft have placed the new browser into the automatic download programme, I decided to go back and revisit the stats again.

The Webkit project have announced support for a new range of CSS declarations, to be used for putting strokes around text. This strikes me as a little strange for two reasons:

Thanks to my new “online friend”, (or how do you call such a thing?) Faruk Ateş, I got the chance to ask the famous webdesigner Andy Clarke some questions via email. He responded quite rapidly, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff among his answers. So check it out:

This site has always been about what we wanted to tell you about CSS3. We have some nice articles coming up, among which at least one interview with a famous webdesigner and I would like to know (so please drop your questions in the comments): what do you want to know about CSS3?