CSS3

Research in Motion, manufacturers of the popular BlackBerry smart phone series, have announced plans to launch a new web browser for their phones based on the open source WebKit layout engine, and offered delegates at this weeks Mobile World Congress a sneak peak (see the video at the end of this post).

Keith Clark, an independent web developer from the UK, has developed a JavaScript solution to IE’s CSS3 shortcomings in relation to CSS3 selectors. CSS3 selectors became the first W3C module to reach proposed recommendation status back in December 2009.

His ie-css3.js project (currently in beta) allows Internet Explorer, versions 5 through 8, to identify CSS3 pseudo-class selectors and render any style rules defined with them. All this is achieved by simply including the script, along with Robert Nyman’s DomAssistant, within the head element of your web pages.

As you may (or may not) know, I’m an Invited Expert on the CSS Working Group at W3C. Mostly I talk about specs. But today, I’m going to talk about testing.

W3C is working on test suites for the CSS specs, and I wanted us to have more web authors involved. Many of you have been frustrated with the inconsistent levels of CSS support across browsers, and I believe collaborative testing is one of the major ways we can improve the situation.

Opera has today issued a pre-alpha release of Opera 10.5 offering increased support for CSS3 and HTML5 as well as vastly increased JavaScript performance and improvements to the browser’s user interface.

Microsoft today offered developers an early glimpse of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) at their 2009 Professional Developers Conference.

Although only at an early stage of development, the IE9 team already looks to have made some impressive leaps forward in terms of web standards support, particularly with regard to CSS3 selectors which, by the looks of the image below (taken from the IE blog), IE9 appears to score an impressive 574 out of 578 in our CSS3 selectors test, a vast improvement over IE8 which scored only 330/578.

CSS3 Selectors Test Results (courtesy of blogs.mdsn.com)

IE9 also looks set to boast support for CSS3 border-radius, an improved scoring in the Acid 3 test (if only slightly) and support for HTML5. You can read the full announcement on the IE blog here and we’ll bring you further announcements on the subject as more information becomes available.

Mozilla has joined a growing list of organizations to throw their support behind the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and will support the embedding of WOFF fonts via @font-face from Firefox 3.6 onwards, or if you’re a developer and want to play around with this now, just download a recent nightly build or beta.

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.

Over the past few weeks I’ve received a number of emails from visitors to CSS3.info regarding CSS3 validation errors when using vendor specific extentions, for example -moz, -webkit, to implement CSS3 in their websites.

This certainly isn’t a new topic, and in fact Joost de Valke first raised the issue on this website back in January 2007, however a glance over the W3C mailing-list archive highlights that this debate is still going strong, with a number of interesting ideas raised, and I thought it would make an interesting discussion point for the CSS3.info community.

Microsoft announced on Tuesday that network managers can now upgrade any Windows PC’s on their networks to the latest version of Internet Explorer 8 via their Windows Server Update Services platform, clearly representing a significant time saver for managers of large networks.

Does this easier to upgrade option mean that large organisations, businesses, schools, universities, colleges, etc., IE6’s last remaining stronghold,  will now finally be encouraged to make the move away from IE6?

As well as all the new CSS features we mentioned previously, Firefox 3.6* is gaining a brand new property value: image-rect. This allows you to clip an area of a background image to display only part of the whole.

It uses Mozilla’s proprietary prefix, and takes two values: a URI for the image, and the boundaries of the clipped area (as four comma separated values, like the clip property):