CSS3

Vitamin have posted an interview with Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft.

He mostly talks up the new RSS features in IE7 (which should really push the standard into the big time), but the most interesting answer he gives is to the final question:

Is IE going to auto-update to IE7? I think that the first thing really is that we can’t really force it on users. That’s not our goal. We really do like to offer users choice. It is a different user interface, some people will be really jarred by that. I think that we certainly want to encourage everyone out there to, um, I do believe that we will offer it through Windows Update, but it won’t be an automatic silent update, certainly it won’t be like you come in one day and suddenly your computer’s running IE7 rather than IE6. Certainly we have to ask the user if they really want it. As nice as it would be to blast it onto everyone’s system I don’t think that can happen, so.

Which means that it will be offered as part of the Windows Update programme, but not downloaded automatically. Which means we’ll have to put up with IE6 for a long time yet, and full CSS3 implementation is a long way down the road.

Windows users who want to see what Safari is all about will be interested to know that a new browser (provisionally called Swift) is in development, which uses the WebKit browsing engine for the first time on Windows. You can download a preview of Swift here; be warned, it is a very early release and so may be buggy. I installed it on my dev PC and it seems to be stable, however.

The WebKit engine is lightning fast at rendering pages, but it does still have a number of quirks when implementing some CSS3 Selectors. If you’re not worried about using development software, download Swift and play with it a little.

Since installing Ubuntu Linux at home, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the Konqueror browser – possibly the most standards-compliant browser available today (please do correct me if I’m wrong).

Konqueror leads the way in the implementation of the CSS3 Selectors module – in the testing I’ve performed so far, only the :checked pseudo-class doesn’t seem to work.

I’ve updated the compatibility table so you can see for yourself how advanced this remarkable browser is; it’s just a shame that less than 1% of internet users choose it as their main navigator.

Probably the first CSS3 Module to become a full recommendation will be Selectors; the W3C CSS3 Roadmap reports that the date for release is March 2006, so it’s overdue already.

Due to the fact that it’s passed all the previous testing stages, many CSS3 Selectors have already been implemented in modern web browsers; Mozilla, Opera, Safari and IE7 all recognise at least a few of them.

We’re putting together a table of levels of CSS3 Selectors support in browsers; it’s still early and the testing is by no means exhaustive, but it should act as a good guide for those who want to start to implement CSS3 in their web pages.