CSS3

To coincide with Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Opera is organising a free Standards.Next event on the topic of CSS3 the following Friday 20^th November, at the Time–Life Building. This space has been generously donated to us by Time & Life.

The Standards.Next concept is to showcase, teach and raise awareness of future Web standards-based technologies. After two events in London featuring HTML5 and Accessibility, our third event is the first time we’ve brought the event State side. With NYC being a design-centric town, CSS3 was the perfect topic.

After many man-hours of work, Opera has unleashed Opera 10. This release contains the Opera Presto 2.2 rendering engine. The two main features in regards to CSS3 are Web Fonts and full support for the CSS 3 Color specification.

Mozilla employee John Daggett has provided some try‐out builds of Firefox with support for the @font-face from CSS3’s web-fonts module. Currently available for Windows and Mac only—no Linux build yet—there remain several caveats as described in his comment on bug 70132, the most important of which being that the same‐site origin restriction is turned on by default, which means that most examples on the web will not work until you turn it off.

Just a flying update, to provide some links of interest (with little-to-no comment):

• Firefox 3.1’s release date has been pushed back a little; I understand that, CSS-wise, Transforms and Web Fonts are the current blockers.
• John Resig takes a look at the implementation of border-image in FF 3.1 (with examples supplied by us)
• The CSS Marquee module has made it to Working Draft status. And now, with the rise of the mobile web and limited screen size, it actually has a practical implementation.

Update by David: Opera has now released a public WinGogi build of Opera passing the DOM test and with pixel perfect rendering. We don’t believe we have passed the test yet, as there are performance issues with a couple of tests. This puts Opera and Safari neck and neck. It is fantastic to see both the Apple and Opera teams taking this test seriously and pushing each other to improve our standards support. Who ever wins the race doesn’t really matter, the main point is that there are now two engines with the required standards support to pass Acid 3. This could be a shot in the arm for both CSS3 and SVG.

Update by David: Although the Acid 3 test was updated to allow WebKit to pass by the letter of the test, they still seem to fail by the spirit of the competition. One of the sections of the Acid 3 test checks SVG Animation. WebKit have added the interface to allow the test to pass, but not fully implemented the feature it was testing. See Jeff Schiller’s blog for more information.

Update by Joost: While Opera might have been the first to pass the test in laboratory conditions, for which I applaud them and I hope they release it ASAP, you can download a WebKit nightly right now and enjoy the full 100/100!

Update In the last few minutes (while I was eating lunch) the final 2% was reaching, making Opera the first browser to reach 100%. There are still some rendering issues, but things are well on track to passing the test. A preview build will be released on Opera Labs shortly. Thanks to our developers in Scandinavia that have been working into the evening to reach 100%.

Safari has been making great gains in its Acid3 score in recent weeks, currently residing on 96%. Opera however has come out of the chasing pack and moved from 77% in the latest weekly release of Kestrel, to 98%100% in the latest internal builds. As part of this it also includes the long requested CSS3 HSLA and RGBA support, and Web Fonts.

These improvements wont be included in a weekly Kestrel build any time soon. Opera, like Mozilla, are at a stage on our development process where we are closing in on a release, and thus regression testing and stability are critically important. This work will most likely (although not confirmed) go into a post Kestrel release, in case it causes regressions and the like. There will probably be an experimental alpha release showing this improved support in the not too distant future.