CSS3

I’ve just put a pre-Alpha build of Firefox 3.1 through its paces, and can confirm (following David Baron’s announcement) that it gets a score of 578/578 in our CSS3 Selectors Test, which means not only support for the new selectors, but some bugs fixed in existing ones. To put that score in perspective, Firefox 3 scores only 357/578.

There is an almost perfect score on Daniel Glazman’s Selectors Test too, with only one discrepancy showing up.

So Safari, Opera and now Firefox all pass the test; of the major browsers, that only leaves one Inevitable Exception…

Those brave enough to try pre-Alpha can download builds from Mozilla’s FTP server. The usual warnings and disclaimers apply!

News about developments in CSS 3 is hard to come by at the moment, so please forgive the slow rate of updates on the site in the last month. I attended the @media conference here in London last week and news on progress in CSS was noticeable by its absence, when even HTML 5 had its own session.

I see that Bert Bos has delivered a couple of presentations on the Template (formerly ‘Advanced’) Layout Module, but I can’t find slides of them anywhere. If anyone attended the talks and can send us copies, do please get in touch.

Other than that, the only news is that the CSS WG have released their list of expected module deliverables; the modules listed in the 2007 snapshot along with Media Queries look set to be Recommendations shortly, with many others to take on Candidate Recommendation status.

And that’s it. Sorry there isn’t more, or that it isn’t more exciting. I’m aiming to put together a load of new examples soon, so that should be more interesting!

Update: As mentioned in a comment below, no sooner do I say there’s not much going on than David Baron announces that the remaining CSS3 selectors have been implemented in a build of Mozilla (which will probably be seen in Firefox 3.1), and Media Queries are set to follow. That’s good news.

Over at Design Shack they’re four posts into the five-post Introduction to CSS3, which covers Borders, Text Effects, the User Interface and (coming soon) Multiple Columns. A nice intro to the subject if our own examples are too complicated for you :p

The new owners of the Fonts and Web Fonts modules, Jason Cranford Teague and John Daggett, say that only about 20% of the Web Fonts module is required for CSS (it is currently part of the SVG charter), and propose simplifying it before merging with the Fonts module. They hope to have a working draft of the new spec in August.

Shaun Inman did a very interesting post yesterday on what he describes as “CSS Qualified Selectors”. The idea is nice, he wants to be able to do:

a {
    text-decoration: none;
    color: #A10;
    border-bottom: 1px dashed #A10;
}

And then for images:

a < img { border: none; }

So if <img> has a parent <a>, the border isn’t there.

What’s most interesting about the post though is the comments. It seems, as Eric Meyer states there, that this kind of selector has been discussed quite a few times on the CSS mailing list, and isn’t doable. Dave Hyatt, one of the core WebKit developers, comments with a good explanation of why it can’t be done. It’s a nice read, and a good insight into the difficulties of developing a new standard.

Jason Cranford Teague has volunteered to edit the CSS Basic UI, CSS Hyperlink Presentation, CSS Fonts and CSS Web Fonts modules and is looking for feedback from users on the latter two. He asks:

Tell me what you think are some of the font styles and features missing from the current specification. What do you expect to be able to do with typography on your Web pages that you can not do now? What are you doing now with kludges that you would like to see simpler ways of doing?

Leave a comment on his blog if you have any ideas; and why not leave a comment here, too, to let us know what your opinions are? No deadline has been given, but I suppose it’s the sooner, the better.