CSS3

The CSSWG has published an updated Working Draft of CSS Box Alignment Level 3. This module extends the Flexbox alignment properties to apply to all layout models and adds additional controls for logical positioning, space distribution, and handling overflowing elements.

This is the vertical centering module, people.

This module’s syntax and functionality is in the process of stabilizing now and we need your feedback. Think of all the cool things you could do with the new alignment properties! Imagine them! Examine them! Make examples! Write rants! And tell us what is awesome and what is stupid so that we can fix it to be better before it gets locked down in shipped browsers.

Changes since the last Working Draft are listed in the Changes section.

Please send feedback! Comment here, post to the (archived) public mailing list [email protected] with the spec code ([css-align]) and your comment topic in the subject line, write a blog post and send us a link, or, if you’re shy, email one of the editors directly. Ranting somewhere else in the ether and expecting us to find it by magic, however, won’t work.

Although the Backgrounds and Borders Level 3 module has already reached the Candidate Recommendation stage of development several times in its lifespan, most recently in July 2012, the module has been updated again after implementation feedback identified the need for a few small changes.

Keep reading for the full list of changes in this version.

Opera Software have announced that they are abandoning their proprietary Presto rendering engine in favour of the open source WebKit rendering engine, for future versions of their mobile and desktop web browsers.

The Japanese government is offering several grants for researching the problems of vertical text layout standardization on next generation web browsers. Each grant is worth ¥100,000 (about €790).

The W3C this month, on 14th August 2012, released an updated working draft of the CSS3 Text Module.

The updated working draft includes several changes from the previous version, published in January 2012. Keep reading for further details.

The CSS3 Media Queries module was released as an official W3C Recommendation on 19 June 2012, marking the end of a development cycle that began over ten years ago (the first working draft of the specification was published on 4 April 2001).

Last month Microsoft announced that they now support (via their IE10 release preview) CSS3 Animations, Transforms and Transitions without the need for vendor prefixes, becoming the first browser to do so.

Released on the 2nd February, the CSS3 Test, created by web standards aficionado Lea Verou, offers a quick and easy way to test and compare browser support for CSS3.

In a blog post accompanying the release of the test, Lea Verou outlines her motivation for building the test as follows:

To motivate browsers to support the less hyped stuff, because I’m tired of seeing the same things being evangelized over and over. There’s much more to CSS3.

Keep reading to see how current release versions of the most popular web browsers shape up.

Tab Atkins and I published an updated Working Draft of CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Level 3 this month. We anticipate that this will be the last draft before Last Call, which we aim to publish in January. If you have an interest in this draft, please review it and send in your comments.

We’ve got a bit of a tricky question on expected behavior of multi-column layout for you folks.