Also (and I’m slightly late with this one) John Resig, creator of the jQuery library, runs an approving eye over the Advanced Layout Module. Webmonkey provide further context. We looked at the module back in 2006 (part one, part two), and my tongue-in-cheek prediction of a ten year wait to use it is now down to only eight years…

As CSS enthusiasts it’s the latter we’re interested in, of course, and the notable CSS3 implementations are:

• Web fonts (OTF, TTF & SVG)
• HSLA & RGBA color values

There’s an overview of the new features on dev.opera.com.

Full details of what’s been changed in these updated proposals can be found in Deans email, however, the most significant changes are splitting 2D and 3D transforms into separate documents and adding a list of properties that can be animated (and how to interpolate different property types)

It’s worth noting that these documents are only proposals, are likely to change, and haven’t formally been accepted by the W3C.

Back in March this year, Dave Hyatt and Daniel Glazman combined forces and presented the first formal proposal for Variables to the Working Group, and (based on this spec) Hyatt subsequently implemented the module into Webkit nightlies; the implementation was distributed for around 5 months, but was later removed due to concerns regarding feature adoption by authors before the spec had any time to mature. In August this year, fantasai submitted a counter-proposal which detailed plans for a parse-time syntax for Constants (which are lost after the variables are parsed and therefore not mutable), compared to Hyatt’s/Glazman’s proposal which allowed for scriptable Variables.

Types of Constants

Fantasai’s proposal features three types of named Constants, ‘values’, ’style-sets’ and ’selectors’; a value constant represents a property value, a style-set constant represents one or more property declarations and a selector constant represents a selector. Each are declared using an @define rule and as fantasai explains, the syntax of an @define rule is the @define at-keyword, followed by either the values keyword (for declaring value constants) or the style-sets keyword (for declaring style-set constants) or the selectors keyword (for declaring selector constants), followed by a block. Examples (ripped straight from her proposal :)) showing the syntax for each of the three Constants are below:-

Values

@define values { textColor: black; bgColor: white; accentColor: silver; accentBorder: double silver 5px; }

Style-sets

define style-sets { noteBox { border-style: solid; padding: 1em; border-radius: 1em; } quoteBox { margin: 1em; } }

A feature of fantasai’s proposal is that constants are re-usable, so you can include ’style-set templates’ which can be applied to multiple selector declarations, using different value constant values.

Selectors

Note that any selectors used in such a variable aren’t allowed to be grouped (using the comma-seperated grouping syntax), since we will have the ability to group selector variables anyway. Selector constants would be useful for repeatedly selecting child/grandchild etc elements deep within a complex DOM tree; consider this:-

@define selectors { deeplynestedelement: body.home > div#main.container ~ ul#navigation > li a[href="http"] span#child > span#imrunningoutofnames;}
deeplynestedelement u, deeplynested b{ color:red; }

And with the addition of a possible :match() pseudo class in Selectors Level 4, you could do something like this to make the above statement even more organised:-

deeplynestedelement:matches(u,b){ color:red; }

Instead Hyatt’s/Glazman’s proposal simply utilises a new @variables rule in which any type of variable (presumably) can be used, without the need for type keywords - their proposal isn’t actually clear on whether different types of variables can be parsed (or whether this proposal simply targets value constants), however, after looking at several test cases, the implementation seems like it was capable of at least parsing ’style-sets’ constants too.

@variables { CorporateLogoBGColor: #fe8d12; }

div.logoContainer { background-color: var(CorporateLogoBGColor); }

Scoping

Two fairly major differences between the two proposals are their scoping behaviour. In fantasai’s proposal, by default, the scope of a named constant does not ordinarily cross @import boundaries; this essentially means that the use of variables declared in one @import are restricted to that particular stylesheet, unlike Hyatt’s/Glazman’s proposal where, by default, constants cross @import boundaries. However, using fantasai’s proposal, authors do have complete control over the scope by using one of three new keywords (which is placed between the @import keyword and the stylesheet URI), push, pull and sync; pull allows constants declared within the imported stylesheet to be used in the importing stylesheet; push allows constants declared above the @import rule in the importing style sheet to be used the imported style sheet; sync allows both of the previous, simultaneously.

The two proposals differ also in the way that constants relate to, and work with Media Types. In Hyatt’s/Glazman’s proposal, an optional Media Type keyword can be placed between the @variables keyword and succeeding block declaration. In fantasais proposal, constant declarations (placed within a @define block) can be nested within an @media block. However she metions, …if declared inside an @media rule, the scope of the declaration does not end with the @media block, meaning that constants can be used outside of the @media they’re placed in. It’s worth mentioning that the @media rule model/syntax differences could be trivially modified to use the other’s media type syntax.

Hakon presented a proposal for a border-parts property, which defines an on/off mask over the border as a series of lengths; you can check out his proposal in more detail on www-style. Note, this is still very much an unapproved proposal and the WG have stated that they are still unsure how usable/useful a solution such as this would be.

Dave Hyatt and Daniel Glazman initially came up with a proposal for CSS Variables, and fantasai has now created a counter-proposal detailing plans for a purely parse-time, non-scriptable solution. To help distinguish between the merits of both, I’ve come up with a brief article comparing and summarising both proposals.

With a kind nod of the head to our post from way back in 2006, Andy Clarke has posted a screencast (with full transcript and code examples) of RGBa values in action on his website For A Beautiful Web.

Over at Javascript Kit they’ve produced an exhaustively in-depth look at structural pseudo-classes.

On the subject of Javascript, Eric Meyer has written about how it can be leveraged to extend CSS3 support across browsers.

And Helen from Helephant.com writes a good introduction to the box-sizing property.

• The shorthand syntax for border-radius has been updated so that you can now specify different irregular curves on an element - this was a well-known abiguity that Peter pointed out in the former Working Draft.
• Handy new background-position syntax for positioning offsets from corners other than the top left
• Spread values for box-shadow
• Box-shadows can now be inverted, to appear ‘inside’ an element thanks for the new inset keyword.
• Addition to background-color value syntax which means fallback colours can be specified
• Addition of no-clip value for background-clip
• Two additional background-size values (cover and contain; they both scale the image whislt retaining its intrinsic aspect ratio. The difference however, is that by using the cover keyword value, the image scales to the largest size such that both its width and its height can completely cover the background positioning area to. Whereas scale scales the image to the largest size such that both its width and its height can fit inside the background positioning area.
• New syntax for the background shorthand property

I’ll try and clarify some of these updates when I get some more time. All in all, some great new updates, though!

Update: I should add, of course, that this is still Beta software, and these issues may well be fixed before launch.

Anyone else noticed any missing features?

If you check their stylesheet, you’ll see this:

/* A font by Jos Buivenga (exljbris) -> www.exljbris.nl */
@font-face {
	  font-family: "Fertigo";
	  src: url(http://www.taptaptap.com/Fertigo.otf)
	  	  format("opentype");
}

Which renders into great looking text like this (at least in my Safari):

Kudos to the tap tap tap people, and if you see more of these in the wild, be sure to let us know!