CSS3

Much of the editorial work done on the various CSS3 modules is done in private. Due to this, there is often the impression that no progress is being made. This impression is deepened if you look at the date of publication for many of the public drafts. However, the perception is not always the same as reality. Some of the editorial work has been made public on the W3C Public CVS Repository for a few modules, and there has been some nice progress.

I’ll start with the module that seems to have the most demand from developers – Backgrounds & Borders. The Working draft that I’ve just linked was last updated in 2005, but as you can see the Editors draft has moved on somewhat, with its last update on Christmas Day (someone was busy giving us a Christmas present). It also has an additional editor, which should speed things up.

So what is new here? Well one of the most demanded properties is border-radius. WebKit and Gecko both implement this, but implemented it in different ways. This has been resolved in this latest draft, to define it to be the same as how Gecko implemented it, but with the addition of a / notation so that both the x and the y radius can be specified in the border-radius shorthand notation. An example of this would be as follows:

border-radius: 1em 2em 3em / 2em 1em;

This would give the top left corner a radius of 1em for the horizontal radius and 2em for the vertical radius. For the top right, it is quite clear that this would be 2em for the horizontal and 1 em for the verticle. As there isn’t a radius value for the verticle bottom right, it takes the value of the top left (opposite corner) which is 2em, and the same for the bottom left corner for both values (2em / 1em).

You can also see the spec defines what happens when the intersecting borders are a different thickness. This property should be more or less ready for implementation, or adapting to the new spec in the case of Safari and Firefox. As always test cases are important, so that implementations can be made interoperable. If any developers want to make any then that would be higly useful.

The box-shadow property has been split in this draft to border-shadow and background-shadow, but I’ve been told this will be changed back to be more inline with what Safari does. The border-image and comma notation for multiple background images are pretty much stable now too.

The Backgrounds and Borders module isn’t the only one to go through changes however. The Namespaces module was also updated on Christmas day and can be found here in Editorial draft form. This has also gained an additional editor. As this module is brief and has already been included in the 2007 CSS snapshot, I assume the changes are just trivial tidying up. I didn’t notice any glaring changes when briefly checking it out. This module is also widely implemented (except IE), so likely doesn’t need much updating.

Grid positioning module is something that has also been in high demand. The fine folks over at Microsoft have been busy on updating this spec, with the editors draft last published in October. You can see a lot of new pretty pictures in the spec. Props for the use of Khoi Vinh’s Yahoo!-a-like Yeaaah example. I look forward to when this reaches an implementable state.

Also updates recently and included on the public server are Paged media, Text and Text Layout. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to see what has changed here.

As well as CSS3 modules, are APIs for the CSS Object Model and CSSOM View module. This is designed to replace DOM Level 2 Style in due course, and are very early level drafts.

As all of these modules are editorial drafts, it should be pointed out that they may change at any time, and any changes are not finalised or offical W3C specs. It is exciting however that there is clear signs of progress, and that the important Backgrounds & Borders module is maturing.