CSS3

After the issue of the overhauled CSS3 Text module recently, I wonder if the Fonts module is due for similar treatment? The current working draft states:

The working group believes this draft is stable and it therefore issues a last call for comments, before requesting the status of Candidate Recommendation for the draft. The deadline for comments is 30 August 2002.

Four and a half years ago! That’s a long feedback process!

The module introduces a few new features into the coder’s lexicon, and although none of them are truly essential, they would be very useful; there is so much text on the web, but typography is the least-developed aspect of CSS.

font-size-adjust lets you preserve the height of type even if the user doesn’t have your first-choice font installed. Certain fonts have higher height aspect than others, so type that you’ve carefully styled to appear at a certain height could suddenly appear smaller if font substitution was used. font-size-adjust let’s you overcome that problem. The module provides some examples of font height aspects.

font-stretch is useful when displaying font families with condensed or extended faces, such as Arial. You can select absolute (condensed, extended, etc) or relative (narrower, wider) values.

font-effect allows you to apply ‘special effects’ to your font; choose from embossed, engraved, or outlined text.

font-smooth switches anti-aliasing on or off. Fonts look so ugly without anti-aliasing, I can’t imagine a situation where you’d ever turn it off!

Finally, three declarations with limited use outside of East Asia: font-emphasize-style and font-emphasize-position, along with the shorthand font-emphasize. These are used only to set emphasis on East Asian characters.

Will this module make it to recommendation in this form? Or will it make a comeback in altered form? I suspect the latter. But I think the most radical change to web typography will come not from the implementation of this module, but from the implementation of @font-face, which will facilitate the use of non-core fonts.

By the way, anyone interested in web typography should, if they haven’t already, read Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton’s Web Typography Sucks presentation. It’s a 4MB PDF download, but well worth ten minutes of your time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We made CSS Mania, and even though our design is way from being the best design up there, i think it rocks being featured on there :) We owe rakaz a big thank you, since without the header he made, we would NEVER have been on there :)

With the money gathered by the links that appear on this page, i have been able to buy the domain css3.net. Don’t know what i’ll do with it yet, it forwards to this domain now. But i’d like to know from you guys: what would be a good thing to do with this domain?