CSS3

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Last week we unveiled the CSS selector test over at css3.info. The test consists of over several hundred separate test cases, each designed to test a certain aspect of the compatibility of your browser with the CSS selector standards. Today we are going to expand the number of test cases to 578.

The new tests have a large impact of the results. There are quite a few browsers that used to pass with the old test cases, but fail with the new test cases. Generally we added test cases for the following situations:

• Dynamic updates: If you update the DOM using Javascript this should also affect the CSS selectors. Take for example the :empty selector. It only matches elements without any children. If you dynamically add a new child it should not longer match that particular element.
• White space in attribute selectors: There are four different ways an attribute selector could be written: [attribute=value], [attribute =value], [attribute= value] and [attribute = value]. We now test if your browser supports all of these variants.
• Case sensitivity of the value in attribute selectors: The previous version of the test contained a test case for determining if the value of an attribute selector was compared in a case-insensitive way. However this was not complete. We only tested the align attribute – which should be treated in a case-insensitive way. Only Konqueror failed this test. But there are also a lot of other attributes which should be tested in a case-sensitive way. Now almost every browser fails this test. More information about this case-sensitivity can be found on rakaz.nl: CSS selector bugs: Case sensitivity

We also changed the way results are reported. Instead of just showing whether a selector failed or passed, we now detect if the selector is fully supported, buggy, or not supported at all. This should give all of us a better idea about the state of the compatibility of each browser.

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.

KHTML, the Konqueror rendering engine, has received another upgrade – and with it, more implementation of the still-officially unannounced CSS3!

According to the release notes, KHTML 3.5.5 now has support for the HSV/HSVA color values. I must confess to being a little baffled by this; the CSS3 color module names HSL/HSLA values (of which HSL is supported), but not HSV/HSVA. Perhaps someone more au fait with colours could help me out on this one.

Also now supported, apparently, is the outline-offset property – which does exactly what it says; offsets the outline around a page element.

Please bear in mind I haven’t tested these, yet.

You can now finally see why Niels Leenheer won the Summer contest. The javascript based CSS selectors test he created is now up and running, and it’s über cool. He discovered quite a few bugs in various browsers while in the process of creating this test, so it worked in all ways. Go check it out!

And don’t forget out the blogpost Niels made about the CSS selector bugs he discovered.

The latest version of the Konqueror browser, 3.5.4, supports more CSS3 declarations.

background-origin, background-clip and background-size are all supported with the proprietary -khtml- prefix. We’ll update our pages soon so you can test them for yourselves.

See the full list of changes for the latest release here.

I’ve said it before, but it’s really a shame that probably less than 0.1% of internet users choose Konqueror.

Update: I’ve just seen that Konqueror has also implemented the :checked selector, making it the first browser to support every CSS3 selector. In the last month, 0.48% of this site’s visitors used Konqueror – and I suspect quite a few times it was me, testing.

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!

So it’s been quite a while, and i should have ended the summer contest almost a complete month ago, but due to extreme business on my side, with a new born son and other stuff, i didn’t get around to it. But I have finally come to it, and here it is:

The CSS3 summer contest winners!

• The fifth prize goes to Mauricio Samy Silva for the complete selectors explanation he made that i have yet to work in to the site.
• The fourth prize goes to Peter Gasston, fellow blogger on this blog, for his blogposts and other great work he did for this site.
• The third prize goes to Mihai Sucan, for his excellent speech preview.
• The second prize goes to Mauricio Samy Silva, for the attribute selectors preview he made.
• The first prize goes to Niels Leenheer, for his javascript based css compatbility tester, which is a very, very cool script, which i’ll soon publish here.

So, people, please contact me with the name and email address you want your prizes to be registered to, and i’ll get them to you!!

A couple of links with some relevancy to CSS3:

CSS Shortcomings: Why CSS2 isn’t perfect for layout, and what’s in the CSS3 spec to correct that.

IE7: Old Bugs for New: Microsoft’s next browser won’t be helping to push the web forward; it’s so full of bugs that even current pages may not display properly.

The Internet Explorer team have released a list of all the CSS changes which have been introduced into IE7. As we’ve already shown there is now the beginning of CSS3 support, with a few selectors included.

Other than that, despite the many changes IE7 is still below the level of almost any other rival browser and is not recommended except to those who have no alternative.