CSS3

Keith Clark, an independent web developer from the UK, has developed a JavaScript solution to IE’s CSS3 shortcomings in relation to CSS3 selectors. CSS3 selectors became the first W3C module to reach proposed recommendation status back in December 2009.

His ie-css3.js project (currently in beta) allows Internet Explorer, versions 5 through 8, to identify CSS3 pseudo-class selectors and render any style rules defined with them. All this is achieved by simply including the script, along with Robert Nyman’s DomAssistant, within the head element of your web pages.

Ian Hickson, the Google employee tasked with creating the next generation of acid test, has completed his work, which is now available for public consumption at its new home, acidtests.org. Unlike the first acid test, which focused on the box model, and the second acid test, which covered a broad variety of basic HTML and CSS features, Acid3 covers 100 of the nooks and crannies of HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAScript, SVG and XML, all through the medium of DOM scripting, a critical requirement for any modern web application. Ian Hickson is also the primary author of the HTML5 specification, which started life as a spec. called ‘Web Apps 1.0’, and as such has lots of application‐related features such as client‐side storage and enhanced forms. Ian wrote 64 of the tests, with the remaining 36 being submitted by both browser vendors and interested web developers.

Work started on the new acid test almost as soon as the IE developer team posted notification that IE8 passes Acid2. As was widely criticised around the ’net recently, it was revealed Internet Explorer 8 would now only pass the test if the server was modified to output a special HTTP header. It is not known to css3.info at this time whether the header would be required for IE8 to achieve compliance in the new test.

The Webkit team have certainly been busy recently; since we mentioned the introduction of web fonts, they’ve also implemented transformations and animations.

Transformations, via the -webkit-transform property, allow you to scale, rotate and skew block elements; reader Ain Tohvri has put together an impressive test suite. At the moment this property doesn’t affect layout, so behaves more like a relatively positioned element.

Animation, which uses the -webkit-transition family of properties, allows you to set timings for fades, rotation, expansion, collapses, and more. They work in the same way as many current JavaScript libraries.

I’m in two minds about this; while it’s always welcome to see more innovation from browser manufacturers, I can’t help but think that they’re focussing their energies in the wrong direction. As I mentioned above, all of the above effects can be replicated with JavaScript libraries, and I don’t think that CSS should be used for controlling behaviour so explicitly. Users who don’t like to see animated pages currently have the option of disabling scripts, but they won’t have the option of disabling CSS in the same way.

Also, IMHO, there are a more pressing areas of CSS that need investigating; the Advanced Layout or Grid Layout modules are more important to the future of CSS than animations and transformations.

On the positive side, the Webkit team have promised to release technical documents which explain the proposed spec in detail.

If these new features float your boat, you can test them out by downloading the latest Webkit nightlies.

Developers interested in both CSS 3 and JavaScript will be interested to know that the latest release of the Prototype framework supports almost all CSS 3 selectors.

Prototype is a JavaScript toolkit used as the base for libraries such as script.aculo.us and moo.fx, which add easy dynamism to websites.