CSS3

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.

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 :)

Apparently we got dugg again, and in the comments of the digg i keep reading that people would like screenshots. Now there’s one thing i do not have a lot of at the moment, and that’s time. So, this is a hint: if you enter in the CSS3 summer holiday contest with screenshots for all the previews we currently have, that would be much, much appreciated by the sole judge…

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?

Once again, i can add a price to the list of prizes to give away in the summer holiday contest! The extra price is: a Professional license of oXygen XML Editor v7.2, which allows the user to use it on any OS (Windows, Unix/Linux, Mac OS X). That’s another $225 on the stack :).

In other news, i’ve had some people announcing they would join in the contest, but have only received ONE submission so far. So people: get them going!

Vitamin have posted an interview with Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft.

He mostly talks up the new RSS features in IE7 (which should really push the standard into the big time), but the most interesting answer he gives is to the final question:

Is IE going to auto-update to IE7? I think that the first thing really is that we can’t really force it on users. That’s not our goal. We really do like to offer users choice. It is a different user interface, some people will be really jarred by that. I think that we certainly want to encourage everyone out there to, um, I do believe that we will offer it through Windows Update, but it won’t be an automatic silent update, certainly it won’t be like you come in one day and suddenly your computer’s running IE7 rather than IE6. Certainly we have to ask the user if they really want it. As nice as it would be to blast it onto everyone’s system I don’t think that can happen, so.

Which means that it will be offered as part of the Windows Update programme, but not downloaded automatically. Which means we’ll have to put up with IE6 for a long time yet, and full CSS3 implementation is a long way down the road.

The undersigned has a post about how he learns webdesign on his school in Denmark, and to be honest, it’s frightening me. Table layouts apparently are the way to go according to his teacher, and designs are made using Dreamweaver. Allthough CSS3 might be a way ahead, if webdesign students in Denmark are taught like that, i hope they read a lot on the side on how things should be done…

Windows users who want to see what Safari is all about will be interested to know that a new browser (provisionally called Swift) is in development, which uses the WebKit browsing engine for the first time on Windows. You can download a preview of Swift here; be warned, it is a very early release and so may be buggy. I installed it on my dev PC and it seems to be stable, however.

The WebKit engine is lightning fast at rendering pages, but it does still have a number of quirks when implementing some CSS3 Selectors. If you’re not worried about using development software, download Swift and play with it a little.