CSS3

The difficulty many developers face when they start moving to table-less sites is getting the layout to work. Floats and positioning are easy enough for basic layouts, but start to become incredibly complex when moving to a more advanced level. When the push to move to pure CSS layouts became intense, the problem was – and is – that tables are still a lot more convenient in many cases, and there is sometimes no decent alternative without contorting yourself; you can’t even use the display: table family, as there’s no support in IE.

An interesting potential solution is in the CSS3 Advanced Layout module.

The Internet Explorer team are asking (again) for input on most-wanted improvements for the next version of IE. Most of the work seems as if it will be focused on Javascript and the DOM, but as you can see on this wishlist there are also requests for CSS updates – including support for RGBA, HSL and HSLA from the CSS3 colour module.

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.

We’ve updated the compatibility table for the Selectors module to include the latest version of the Konqueror browser. Konqueror supports even more selectors than we currently have on the table, so the table will be expanded further shortly.

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.

Hello one and all, I’m Nicholas Shanks and have been helping out behind the scenes. My role is to build up the corpus of basic information about CSS Level 3 and how it has been developed, the W3C and WHATWG, and how everything in CSS3 came to be there.

To this end my first page has now gone live, detailing the current progress of each and every CSS 3 module through the vetting process. It allows you to see at a glance which modules are considered more complete. I hope you find it useful!

[tags]css level 3 modules, css3 modules, w3c, whatwg[/tags]

Update: Please see the note at the end of this article.

A potentially useful feature of CSS3 is the @font-face rule, which allows the developer to specify a font for the page that may not already be on the client’s system. Until now, most web sites have been developed with a small list of ‘web safe’ fonts – tahoma, verdana, etc, which are native to most operating systems.

@font-face will allow the browser to download a font for rendering the page; a link is given to either a remote site or a folder on the local site which the browser will access, download, install and render, so the site can be viewed in the way the designer desired.