CSS3

KHTML, the Konqueror rendering engine, has received another upgrade – and with it, more implementation of the still-officially unannounced CSS3!

According to the release notes, KHTML 3.5.5 now has support for the HSV/HSVA color values. I must confess to being a little baffled by this; the CSS3 color module names HSL/HSLA values (of which HSL is supported), but not HSV/HSVA. Perhaps someone more au fait with colours could help me out on this one.

Also now supported, apparently, is the outline-offset property – which does exactly what it says; offsets the outline around a page element.

Please bear in mind I haven’t tested these, yet.

The latest version of the Konqueror browser, 3.5.4, supports more CSS3 declarations.

background-origin, background-clip and background-size are all supported with the proprietary -khtml- prefix. We’ll update our pages soon so you can test them for yourselves.

See the full list of changes for the latest release here.

I’ve said it before, but it’s really a shame that probably less than 0.1% of internet users choose Konqueror.

Update: I’ve just seen that Konqueror has also implemented the :checked selector, making it the first browser to support every CSS3 selector. In the last month, 0.48% of this site’s visitors used Konqueror – and I suspect quite a few times it was me, testing.

Eric Meyer, in one of his latest posts in the W3C change series, proposes quite a radical change for the W3C: full independence.
The article is well worth a read, coming from one of the people with the most insight in to W3C operations, and I agree with him: it’s a very good idea. Let’s hope more people think of it that way, and let it happen!

A couple of links with some relevancy to CSS3:

CSS Shortcomings: Why CSS2 isn’t perfect for layout, and what’s in the CSS3 spec to correct that.

IE7: Old Bugs for New: Microsoft’s next browser won’t be helping to push the web forward; it’s so full of bugs that even current pages may not display properly.

The Internet Explorer team have released a list of all the CSS changes which have been introduced into IE7. As we’ve already shown there is now the beginning of CSS3 support, with a few selectors included.

Other than that, despite the many changes IE7 is still below the level of almost any other rival browser and is not recommended except to those who have no alternative.

We made CSS Mania, and even though our design is way from being the best design up there, i think it rocks being featured on there :) We owe rakaz a big thank you, since without the header he made, we would NEVER have been on there :)

With the money gathered by the links that appear on this page, i have been able to buy the domain css3.net. Don’t know what i’ll do with it yet, it forwards to this domain now. But i’d like to know from you guys: what would be a good thing to do with this domain?

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.

The undersigned has a post about how he learns webdesign on his school in Denmark, and to be honest, it’s frightening me. Table layouts apparently are the way to go according to his teacher, and designs are made using Dreamweaver. Allthough CSS3 might be a way ahead, if webdesign students in Denmark are taught like that, i hope they read a lot on the side on how things should be done…

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.