CSS3

The Webkit project have announced support for a new range of CSS declarations, to be used for putting strokes around text. This strikes me as a little strange for two reasons:

Thanks to my new “online friend”, (or how do you call such a thing?) Faruk Ateş, I got the chance to ask the famous webdesigner Andy Clarke some questions via email. He responded quite rapidly, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff among his answers. So check it out:

This site has always been about what we wanted to tell you about CSS3. We have some nice articles coming up, among which at least one interview with a famous webdesigner and I would like to know (so please drop your questions in the comments): what do you want to know about CSS3?

In my previous post I don’t think I put enough emphasis on the fact that the Advanced Layout method may never happen; it could be dropped by the W3C, never implemented by the browser makers, or replaced by a better method.

However, let’s work on the assumption that it does get implemented and take a closer look.

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.

I went through the logs of some of the sites I own or manage today, to see what kind of uptake there’s been for IE7. From ten sites, some business and some personal, the percentage of users varies between 1% and 12% using IE7.

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.

It’s all gone a bit quiet round here… sorry about that, but there’s not a lot of movement on CSS3, and I know the authors here are quite busy personally.

Anyway, potentially big news is that the WHATWG are asking for developer feedback on HTML5.

I’m still wading through the document, but of what I’ve read so far, of most interest to CSS fanatics will be a group of new, semantic tags; for example

Of course these aren’t directly related to CSS3, but it should help save a lot of classes, ids and tag soup if implemented – and that’s the key. Even if it turns into a recommendation, how long until HTML5 is supported in IE – if at all. Many questions, many variables; but stay positive, and give your opinion.

Last week we unveiled the CSS selector test over at css3.info. The test consists of over several hundred separate test cases, each designed to test a certain aspect of the compatibility of your browser with the CSS selector standards. Today we are going to expand the number of test cases to 578.

The new tests have a large impact of the results. There are quite a few browsers that used to pass with the old test cases, but fail with the new test cases. Generally we added test cases for the following situations:

• Dynamic updates: If you update the DOM using Javascript this should also affect the CSS selectors. Take for example the :empty selector. It only matches elements without any children. If you dynamically add a new child it should not longer match that particular element.
• White space in attribute selectors: There are four different ways an attribute selector could be written: [attribute=value], [attribute =value], [attribute= value] and [attribute = value]. We now test if your browser supports all of these variants.
• Case sensitivity of the value in attribute selectors: The previous version of the test contained a test case for determining if the value of an attribute selector was compared in a case-insensitive way. However this was not complete. We only tested the align attribute – which should be treated in a case-insensitive way. Only Konqueror failed this test. But there are also a lot of other attributes which should be tested in a case-sensitive way. Now almost every browser fails this test. More information about this case-sensitivity can be found on rakaz.nl: CSS selector bugs: Case sensitivity

We also changed the way results are reported. Instead of just showing whether a selector failed or passed, we now detect if the selector is fully supported, buggy, or not supported at all. This should give all of us a better idea about the state of the compatibility of each browser.

Bert Bos announced on the www-style mailinglist that the CSS3 Paged Media module Working Draft (WD) is now in Last call status, which means that it will probably advance to being a Candidate Recommendation (CR), according to the W3C development process.

This module contains ways to define pages and printing behaviors for them. Read the announcement and the module if you’re interested.