CSS3

This week has seen the announcement of a couple of new online tools for generating cross-browser CSS3 rules, CSS3 Please! and CSS3 Generator.

CSS3 Please!, produced by Paul Irish and Jonathon Neal, aims to simplify the design process by allowing designers to enter one value, and have this instantly synced and normalised for each vendor-specific prefix, with the corresponding code generated automatically.

The tool offers support for border-radius, box-shadow, linear-gradients, rotation, rgba colors and @font-face, with work underway on support for skew and scale. In some circumstances the tool also offers support for Internet Explorer using IE filters to replicate the same effects as achieved by CSS3 properties. CSS3 Please! has been gaining a significant amount of interest around the blogosphere since its launch earlier this week.

The announcement of our redesign last month received an overwhelming number of comments, with the majority expressing negative feedback. The main concerns raised were that the new design was too dark, lifeless / boring and lacking in fun, spirit and character.

As previously stated, the main reason for the redesign was from a functional perspective to allow us to expand the site and take it forward. The reason that the old design was removed, and not simply recoded to make the functional changes required, was in fact due to a number of negative comments I had received about the previous design since taking over the site in July 2009, however following the large number of comments received over the last three weeks in support of the previous design, it is now apparent that these negative comments were not representative of the views of the majority of our readers. With this in mind I have made the decision to temporarily reinstate the old design whilst considering the best way to move forward with the site.

Benjamin Meyer has been busy creating Anigma, an online game designed to showcase some of the functionality in CSS3, particularly CSS3 Transitions and Animations.

I’m pleased today to be able to announce the completion of CSS3 .info’s redesign, bringing the site a much needed new look and feel.

Research in Motion, manufacturers of the popular BlackBerry smart phone series, have announced plans to launch a new web browser for their phones based on the open source WebKit layout engine, and offered delegates at this weeks Mobile World Congress a sneak peak (see the video at the end of this post).

Keith Clark, an independent web developer from the UK, has developed a JavaScript solution to IE’s CSS3 shortcomings in relation to CSS3 selectors. CSS3 selectors became the first W3C module to reach proposed recommendation status back in December 2009.

His ie-css3.js project (currently in beta) allows Internet Explorer, versions 5 through 8, to identify CSS3 pseudo-class selectors and render any style rules defined with them. All this is achieved by simply including the script, along with Robert Nyman’s DomAssistant, within the head element of your web pages.

As you may (or may not) know, I’m an Invited Expert on the CSS Working Group at W3C. Mostly I talk about specs. But today, I’m going to talk about testing.

W3C is working on test suites for the CSS specs, and I wanted us to have more web authors involved. Many of you have been frustrated with the inconsistent levels of CSS support across browsers, and I believe collaborative testing is one of the major ways we can improve the situation.

Opera has today issued a pre-alpha release of Opera 10.5 offering increased support for CSS3 and HTML5 as well as vastly increased JavaScript performance and improvements to the browser’s user interface.

Following on from the W3C TPAC 2009, held back in November, CSS3 Selectors was officially advanced to Proposed Recommendation by the W3C Director earlier this week.

The annual W3C Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee (TPAC) meetings week took place last month bringing together the CSS Working Group, amongst others, for a series of face to face meetings in Santa Clara, California. Minutes from the meeting have now been made available online and promise progress for a number of CSS3 modules including CSS3 Selectors, Multicolumn Layout, Transitions, Transforms and Animations.