CSS3

We’ve teamed up with SitePoint to give you the chance to win one of five free digital copies of their latest book – The CSS3 Anthology: Take Your Sites to New Heights by Rachel Andrew.

This competition has now closed!

Released on the 2nd February, the CSS3 Test, created by web standards aficionado Lea Verou, offers a quick and easy way to test and compare browser support for CSS3.

In a blog post accompanying the release of the test, Lea Verou outlines her motivation for building the test as follows:

To motivate browsers to support the less hyped stuff, because I’m tired of seeing the same things being evangelized over and over. There’s much more to CSS3.

Keep reading to see how current release versions of the most popular web browsers shape up.

Back in March 2011 we reported that Think Vitamin were offering free access to their entire CSS3 Video Training Course for 24 hours only.

I’m pleased to announce that this week I received an email from Alan Johnson at Think Vitamin letting me know that once again they’ve decided to offer free access to the entire CSS3 Video Training Course, minus the Master Class project – which is only available to paid members. However, this time there is no 24 hour time limit, with the videos being available for ‘the foreseeable future’ – however long that may prove to be.

Stunning CSS3 by Zoe Gillenwater is a project-based book offering a solid guide to what’s possible and what’s coming around the corner with CSS.

Published by PeachPit, Stunning CSS3 is set in the same easy-going, information-packed writing style that carried out in her previous book, Fluid Web Layout.

Update: this offer is now available for the foreseeable future

Think Vitamin are offering free access to their entire CSS3 Video Training Course for 24 hours, until Wednesday March 16th at 11:59pm.

The series, totalling 51 videos, covers CSS3 basics such as border-radius, box-shadow and CSS3 gradients, as well as more complex subjects including CSS3 selectors, transitions, animations and transforms.

CSS3 for Web Designers, released yesterday, is the second instalment in A Book Apart’s For Web Designers series of mini books for, unsurprisingly, web designers.

The book, available both as an ebook (now) and a paperback (from 22nd Nov), aims to show designers those aspects of CSS3 which can be comfortably used today, along with workarounds for older browsers which don’t support CSS3 (e.g. Internet Explorer 6.0 through 8.0).

Google have recently updated their HTML5ROCKS site, originally launched in June this year, with numerous new demos and tutorials for HTML5 and CSS3. The latest update adds, amongst other articles, a tutorial for CSS3 Web Fonts (with @font-face) and a new ‘HTML5 Studio’ – offering a number of live demos for many of the new possibilities offered by HTML5 and CSS3.

Since being updated the site has been causing quite a stir online and if you’ve not come across the site before, it’s an excellent resource for getting to grips with HTML5 & CSS3 and certainly worth a visit.

This week has seen the announcement of a couple of new online tools for generating cross-browser CSS3 rules, CSS3 Please! and CSS3 Generator.

CSS3 Please!, produced by Paul Irish and Jonathon Neal, aims to simplify the design process by allowing designers to enter one value, and have this instantly synced and normalised for each vendor-specific prefix, with the corresponding code generated automatically.

The tool offers support for border-radius, box-shadow, linear-gradients, rotation, rgba colors and @font-face, with work underway on support for skew and scale. In some circumstances the tool also offers support for Internet Explorer using IE filters to replicate the same effects as achieved by CSS3 properties. CSS3 Please! has been gaining a significant amount of interest around the blogosphere since its launch earlier this week.

Font Dragr is a HTML5/CSS3 powered web app for testing custom web fonts. The app allows you to drag and drop your truetype (ttf), opentype (otf), scalable vector graphics (svg) or Web Open Font Format (WOFF) fonts into the webpage for an instant preview of how the font will be rendered in the browser, you can even edit the example text.

Andy Clarke’s Transcending CSS is a book that anyone involved with client-side web development should read.

For web designers who know some code there is plenty of forward thinking material about the importance of semantic HTML; for coders with an eye for design there is lots of food for thought about colour, style and inspiration; for everyone, there are some genuinely innovative tips on using CSS to tie it all together.