CSS3

Back in May 2003, the CSS3 Text Module made it to Candidate Recommendation status, meaning:

[The] W3C believes the specification is ready to be implemented.

Before it made the next step to Proposed Recommendation status, however, it was decided that a complete overhaul was needed. Four years later, and the renamed CSS Text Level 3 has been issued as a Working Draft.

This module:

… defines properties for text manipulation and specifies their processing model. It covers line breaking, justification and alignment, white space handling, text decoration and text transformation.

This is still a very rough document, with some intended declarations not defined yet – text-overflow, for example. You can see how it differs from the previous version with this list of changes.

First, here’s another table showing CSS support in web browsers, including CSS3 declarations. Unfortunately the author only seems to have access to browsers that run in Windows, so it’s not as complete as it could be. Interesting, nonetheless.

Update: I stand corrected. There are options to choose which browsers display in the table, which makes it very useful.

And here’s a demonstration purportedly showing an implementation of the text-overflow: ellipsis property using CSS and Javascript (read about the property here). Perhaps I’m missing something, but it only seems to work patchily for me in Firefox and Opera; I wonder how much testing it’s had.

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

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.

In my previous post I don’t think I put enough emphasis on the fact that the Advanced Layout method may never happen; it could be dropped by the W3C, never implemented by the browser makers, or replaced by a better method.

However, let’s work on the assumption that it does get implemented and take a closer look.

The difficulty many developers face when they start moving to table-less sites is getting the layout to work. Floats and positioning are easy enough for basic layouts, but start to become incredibly complex when moving to a more advanced level. When the push to move to pure CSS layouts became intense, the problem was – and is – that tables are still a lot more convenient in many cases, and there is sometimes no decent alternative without contorting yourself; you can’t even use the display: table family, as there’s no support in IE.

An interesting potential solution is in the CSS3 Advanced Layout module.

The Internet Explorer team are asking (again) for input on most-wanted improvements for the next version of IE. Most of the work seems as if it will be focused on Javascript and the DOM, but as you can see on this wishlist there are also requests for CSS updates – including support for RGBA, HSL and HSLA from the CSS3 colour module.

Since installing Ubuntu Linux at home, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the Konqueror browser – possibly the most standards-compliant browser available today (please do correct me if I’m wrong).

Konqueror leads the way in the implementation of the CSS3 Selectors module – in the testing I’ve performed so far, only the :checked pseudo-class doesn’t seem to work.

I’ve updated the compatibility table so you can see for yourself how advanced this remarkable browser is; it’s just a shame that less than 1% of internet users choose it as their main navigator.

We’ve updated the compatibility table for the Selectors module to include the latest version of the Konqueror browser. Konqueror supports even more selectors than we currently have on the table, so the table will be expanded further shortly.

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.