CSS3

It was announced yesterday on the Webkit Blog that their latest nightlies now score 91/100 on Acid3. EDIT:- As of last night, the latest nightlies now score 92/100.

Kudos to the Webkit guys for obtaining such a high score after Acid3’s launch only earlier this month; I recommend you subscribe to the blog to keep up with their work, as it’s pretty active at the moment and I’m sure that activity is only going to increase the closer they come to passing Acid3.

A meta bug has been created in their Bugzilla which you can use to keep track of their progress and outstanding bugs relating to an Acid3 pass.

Other browser scores below:-

• IE8 – 17/100
• Opera nightly (build 4681) – 65/100
• FF3b pre 5 – 70/100

I’m I began writing this post in IE8*, something I didn’t think I’d be doing just a short while ago; the IE team have certainly been busy in the last 18 months! As it’s beta software there are obviously quite a few rough edges and we can’t consider it feature complete, but I thought I’d take a look at what features of CSS 3 have made it in already.

The short answer: not many! In fact, the only ones I can find are the substring matching attribute selectors:

E[att^='val']
E[att$='val']
E[att*='val']

These allow you to choose elements based on substrings of their attributes; that begin with, end with, or contain (respectively) the provided value. Update: As has been pointed out in the comments, these were already available in IE7; I should have known that, as I wrote the (now outdtated) compatibility table! In my defence, it was very late when I wrote this post…

Other than that, nothing I can see. Although it’s not new to CSS3, generated content is supported, which is good news. Using the :before and :after pseudo-elements, you can add text content (and images according to the spec, although they don’t seem to work in IE8);

E:before { content: 'foo'; }
E:after { content: 'foo'; }

No opacity or RGBA yet, which is a shame as they’re supported in almost all of the other browsers. Still, it must be remembered that there’s still time for new features to be added before release.

* I had to switch to Firefox; IE8 is not ready just yet!

So, MS have finally pulled their finger out and released it

Link to installers

WARNING – the word on the street is that it IE8 automatically overwrites any IE7 installation so bear that in mind!

Daniel Glazman has created a new test to show CSS3 Selectors support in your browser. He has also posted results for current browsers.

With this and the Acid 3 test, there’s a lot for browser makers to aim for.

Yesterday, Dean Hachamovitch announced that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what they announced initially which prompted a huge amount of feedback (good and bad) within the web community.

Dean goes on to mention that the change of heart was due to MS recently publishing a set of Interoperability Principles and suggesting that “…IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action”.

Full blog post