CSS3

The W3C has updated the working draft of the CSS3 module — Generated Content for Paged Media.

It’s all gone a bit quiet round here… sorry about that, but there’s not a lot of movement on CSS3, and I know the authors here are quite busy personally.

Anyway, potentially big news is that the WHATWG are asking for developer feedback on HTML5.

I’m still wading through the document, but of what I’ve read so far, of most interest to CSS fanatics will be a group of new, semantic tags; for example

Of course these aren’t directly related to CSS3, but it should help save a lot of classes, ids and tag soup if implemented – and that’s the key. Even if it turns into a recommendation, how long until HTML5 is supported in IE – if at all. Many questions, many variables; but stay positive, and give your opinion.

Bert Bos announced on the www-style mailinglist that the CSS3 Paged Media module Working Draft (WD) is now in Last call status, which means that it will probably advance to being a Candidate Recommendation (CR), according to the W3C development process.

This module contains ways to define pages and printing behaviors for them. Read the announcement and the module if you’re interested.

Eric Meyer, in one of his latest posts in the W3C change series, proposes quite a radical change for the W3C: full independence.
The article is well worth a read, coming from one of the people with the most insight in to W3C operations, and I agree with him: it’s a very good idea. Let’s hope more people think of it that way, and let it happen!

Håkon Wium Lie, the inventor of CSS answers some very interesting questions about the future of CSS in this article.

Probably the first CSS3 Module to become a full recommendation will be Selectors; the W3C CSS3 Roadmap reports that the date for release is March 2006, so it’s overdue already.

Due to the fact that it’s passed all the previous testing stages, many CSS3 Selectors have already been implemented in modern web browsers; Mozilla, Opera, Safari and IE7 all recognise at least a few of them.

We’re putting together a table of levels of CSS3 Selectors support in browsers; it’s still early and the testing is by no means exhaustive, but it should act as a good guide for those who want to start to implement CSS3 in their web pages.

Since i’ve started with my CSS3 preview pages, i’ve had the same question at least 10 times already: why do browsers prefix CSS3 features? It seems so weird, when both WebKit and Firefox have border-radius implemented, you have to write two lines for it to work in both browsers.