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.

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.

The CSS3 Selectors module and CSS3 Namespaces module have both been released as official W3C recommendations, becoming the second and third CSS3 modules, respectively, to reach the end of the development cycle, following on from the release of the CSS3 Color module as a W3C recommendation earlier this year.

Hats off to the CSS Working Group, it must have been a busy few weeks. Not only have they released several updated specifications, most notably the long awaited publication of the CSS2.1 specification as an official W3C recommendation, but also introduced a major redesign of their home page.

The release of CSS2.1 as an official recommendation also paved the way for the CSS3 Color module to advance to the recommendation stage, becoming the first CSS3 specification to be released as an official W3C Recommendation.

Posting on behalf of Tab Atkins about an open spec issue:

I’ve been pretty adamant for some time that gradients should use the math-y interpretation of angles, where 0deg is East and 90deg is North. In addition to matching what you learn in school about polar coordinates, it matches what tools like Photoshop expose. Other members of the WG, though, have been equally adamant that we should more closely match existing language conventions, particularly that bigger angles mean clockwise rotation.

The strength of my conviction has eroded over time. It really is true that every other use of angles uses them to represent clockwise rotations. In SVG, angles are present in transforms and the glyph-orientation properties, while in CSS they’re present in transforms, image-orientation, and the azimuth and elevation aural properties. In all of them (save elevation, which rotates in a different axis), the rotation is clockwise.

The W3C CSS Working Group have introduced a new module to CSS3, the CSS3 Grid Layout module, as well as released two further updated specifications, for the CSS3 Multi-column Layout and CSS3 Text modules.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s new.

The W3C CSS Working Group have released two further updated working draft specifications for CSS3.

The first, released on 11 March, sees a major overhaul of the CSS3 Flexible Box Layout module. The second, released on 24 March, brings several enhancements to the CSS3 Fonts module.